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Wall Street
Journal...
Speaking
With the Speaker
John
Boehner talks about the need for Republican unity and why the House is
in ill
repute.
By Peggy
Noonan
March 12, 2012
John
Boehner is sighing. It’s one of those days, or maybe epochs. He’s just
spoken
to the House GOP conference. Some members are feeling fractious,
disheartened.
Time for a St. Crispin’s Day speech. What did he tell them? “I told
them they
have ocular rectitis. That’s when your eyes get confused with your
butt, and it
develops into [an unnecessarily fecal] outlook on life.”
It’s late
Wednesday morning and the speaker of the House is seated in his Capitol
office
smoking and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. What the conference is
feeling
is “the normal state of affairs for a majority that’s frustrated by a
president
who doesn’t want to work with us and a Senate that doesn’t do the bills
we send
over. And then the frustration builds and they get to nipping at each
other.
And so it was one of those mornings where you had to kind of reset the
table.”
He told
them the historical moment is more promising than it looks: “Instead of
looking
at what we can do with it, we’re busy gnawing at each other over small
differences that we might have.”
He sighs. A
really big sigh.
“There’s a
much bigger prize here. You can’t get the bigger prize without action.
And we
need to be united in order to have action.”
The prize
is winning the White House and the Senate. “They all understand there’s
big
limits on what we can do only having one House. And while we’ve been
able to
stop all the real craziness of what’s going on, trying to peel this
back . . .
is gonna be difficult.” By “this,” he means the size, cost and power of
the
federal government. “It took the other side 80 years to build this
monstrosity
. . . and our guys want to get rid of it tomorrow.” Congress, he says,
doesn’t
work that way. The Founders designed it not to work that way.
What of the
charge the tea party has made the House ungovernable? “False,” he says,
it’s a
media creation. “Virtually every Republican in the House was supported
by the
tea party in the last election. My problem is not with our 89 freshmen,
my
problem is with a few senior members who—they always want more. They
always
want more than what you can produce.” His predecessor, Nancy Pelosi,
“went
through the same problem with her side.”
But it gets
on his nerves. “With modern communications, a handful of them who feel
differently will go out there and make their case on why we oughta go
further,
why we oughta do more. And there’ll be a couple of outside
organizations who
come along and gin it up, and then all of a sudden [some] members are
getting
heat, and you know they really want to be with us but they don’t want
to put up
with the heat at home. But it’s not the freshmen, that’s the amazing
part of
this.”
His
relationship with Majority Leader Eric Cantor? “Eric and I have never
disagreed
on strategy, ever. From time to time there’s been some disagreement on
tactics,
not usually between Eric and I, usually on the staff level.” The
speaker, the
leader and their staffs met in the speaker’s office after the House
retreat.
“Eric and I . . . both knew that we can’t be divided, and he and I had
some
conversation with our staffs that we’re all going to be on the same
page.”
As for the
president, “he and I get along fine. But boy do we have big
differences.”
Mr. Boehner
turns to the debt ceiling struggle of six months ago: “We had a little
rough
spot last summer. I would argue he moved the goal posts, and blew up
negotiations about the debt deal.”
Congress
needs “to show . . . that in spite of our differences we can find
common ground
to do the work of the American people. But I’ll just say this. There’s
nobody
who tried harder last year with the president to do the right thing.
There’s
nobody who walked further out on a limb than I did to try to get him to
do the
right thing. And one of my greatest disappointments was not getting an
agreement.”
The drama
was a trauma. “Oh, it really was. And we were pretty close to doing
something
nobody would have ever believed—real changes, real cuts. I put revenues
on the
table.” He says he put forward $800 billion in spending cuts and tax
reforms—closing loopholes while lowering corporate and personal rates.
“A lot
of my guys would have choked to death on it.” But the deal, he says,
was
doable.
What
happened? The White House “spun this thing that I walked away from
this.”
Actually, he says, the president did: “He lost his courage. . . . He
just
couldn’t bring himself to do what he had to do.”
Mr. Boehner
says his staff felt some anxiety about what he’d offered. “I looked at
them all
because they were all getting nervous. I said, ‘Listen, if this means
the end
of my Speakership, fine.’” The famously emotional Boehner’s eyes filled
with
tears, and he paused: “I can walk out of here knowing I did the right
thing. .
. . If we don’t deal with it we’ll be like Greece and the rest of them.”
On the
question of Congress’s low approval ratings, the speaker names the
usual
reasons: The economy is bad, Americans are frustrated, they look to
Washington
“and all they see is chaos.” Also, Congress has been America’s
“favorite
whipping boy for 200 years.” So the low numbers are “not surprising.”
What about
corruption? You’re the speaker of the whole House. Is corruption part
of
Congress’s DNA? Is it the No. 1 thing that’s bipartisan? “All members,”
he
says, “should be held to the highest ethical standards.” In the past
six years,
since becoming majority leader, he’s had many conversations with
members about
“allegations that were out there, public and not public.”
“People
think I’ve got this job as a leader. They don’t realize that I have
about 200
responsibilities and roles. I’ve gotta be the big brother, the father,
I gotta
be the disciplinarian, the dean of students, the principal, the
spouse—you
can’t believe all the roles that I have to play! But one of them is,
you know,
some problems you can nip early. I had three guys in here a few years
ago, I
said ‘Boys, you’re cruising down the wrong path.’ Two of them listened,
one of
them didn’t. He’s no longer here.”
“We got 435
members. It’s just a slice of America, it really is. We got some of the
smartest people in the country who serve here, and some of the dumbest.
We got
some of the best people you’d ever meet, and some of the raunchiest.
We’ve got
‘em all.”
How does
word reach him that a scandal may be brewing? “Oh, it gets to me a lot
of ways.
The press, I hear about it from friends, I hear about it from
colleagues. I’m
out and about, I do what I do, I hear everything. There are no secrets
in this
town.”
In his
time, has congressional misbehavior, publicly known or not, tended to
go under
the broadly defined category of “romance” or of “finance”?
A long
sigh.
“Rarely
is money an issue.”
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