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John Boehner Unchained: The former House speaker feels liberated—but he’s also seething about what happened to his party. - "Republicans, having spent and borrowed extravagantly during the Bush years—and expanded the reach of the federal government with No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, and the bailouts—now faced a conservative backlash. Pivoting sharply, GOP lawmakers greeted the election of Barack Obama in 2008 with unified opposition to his stimulus package. This brought accusations of hypocrisy. 'People thought we had spent too much. Thought the tax cuts were too much,' Boehner says. 'OK, fine—we need to look ahead. We’ve got a spending problem.'
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"The rising influence of Heritage and other 'outside groups' on the right—Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots—made the speaker’s job infinitely harder. Egged on by an angry GOP base, they repeatedly cornered Republicans into fights they couldn’t possibly win. The defining implosion of their first year in the majority came in late July when it was revealed that Jordan’s staff had been conspiring with outside groups to pressure RSC members—Jordan’s own members—to vote against Boehner’s debt deal. It was a stunning breach of decorum and a confirmation of what Obama had already figured out: that Boehner wasn’t dealing from a place of strength. Jordan apologized profusely to the conference, but it was too late. Whatever trust once existed between the warring GOP factions had vanished, never to return—and it destroyed Boehner’s credibility with Democrats. 'He could practically never deliver his votes,' Pelosi tells me. When I ask Boehner about this, during a rain delay at Wetherington, he smirks. 'It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked,” he says. “It’s hard to negotiate with no dick.'
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"The resentment toward Boehner was rooted in many grievances, some more legitimate than others. Without question, he ran the House in a top-down fashion inherited from Gingrich, centralizing the policymaking process in leadership offices and spurning input from back-bench members. He would also anger conservatives by allowing deadlines to creep up, refusing to state the conference’s strategy because he knew they would disapprove—and then he would jam them at the last minute. There also was outrage at his punitive tactics. In late 2012, he had kicked Huelskamp and several other conservatives off key committees as punishment for their votes against leadership initiatives. It was predictable: The earmark ban had robbed Boehner of his best tool to incentivize on-the-fence members, leaving him to lead with all sticks and few carrots. With outside groups actively recruiting primary challengers, members in red districts often saw no political upside in voting with the leadership—a dynamic Boehner could not counter.
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"Boehner worries about the deepening fissures in American society. But he sees Trump as more of a symptom than the cause of what is a longer arc of social and ideological alienation, fueled by talk radio and Fox News on the right and MSNBC and social media on the left. 'People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.' Why is that? 'Because it wasn’t him!' Boehner replies. 'It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.'
"He continues: 'I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.' Boehner, seated in his favorite recliner, lights another cigarette. 'I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.'"
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