WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, sacrificed his job Friday — a wrenching decision that he determined was the only way to spare the country the trauma of yet another government shutdown.
“More than anything, my first job as speaker is to protect the institution,” Boehner said at a news conference, after making the stunning announcement that he will resign from the House on Oct. 30.
While the shutdown crisis may be averted for now, the forces of dysfunction that drove Boehner to quit remain and will likely bedevil the next speaker in similar ways.
Boehner’s decision came at a poignant moment. He announced it the day after an emotional high point for the famously sentimental Boehner, in which the onetime altar boy from Reading, Ohio, hosted Pope Francis for an unprecedented address to a joint meeting of Congress.
The speaker’s resignation — the timing of which he said he decided only Friday morning, after prayer, coffee and his regular breakfast at Pete’s Diner on Capitol Hill — clears the way for passage of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government.
That legislation does not contain line-in-the-sand language that would defund Planned Parenthood, which has become a high-profile cause on the right, but the measure goes only through mid-December.
A group of anti-Boehner insurgents had threatened that if the speaker capitulated to Democrats on the Planned Parenthood funding, they would move to topple him by forcing a vote to vacate the speaker’s chair in the House. Boehner will move a package that includes the Planned Parenthood funding, which is expected to be approved next week. But his announced resignation denies the rebels their best leverage for retribution.
In the meantime, the House Republican majority must pick a new leadership team, with Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., considered the most likely replacement.
But there is no reason to believe that McCarthy or whoever the next speaker is will be able to end or contain the intense civil war inside the House Republican Conference.
Boehner’s leadership became a flash point in that battle, with a new generation of GOP lawmakers saying he has been too quick to capitulate to President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress.
There had been threats from more than 30 House Republicans that they would force a no-confidence vote against Boehner, which meant the speaker might have ended up in the position of relying upon Democrats to maintain his increasingly tenuous hold on the speaker’s gavel.
“I don’t want my members to go through this, and I certainly don’t want the institution to go through this,” he said.
Many of the same newcomers who restored the GOP to its majority in the House and made Boehner its speaker have been the most contemptuous of his management style, which they say represents the established order that they came to Washington to destroy.
Many count Boehner’s resignation as a victory.
Obama “has run circles around us since John Boehner was speaker of the House. I think it’s a victory for the American people,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., one of those elected in the momentous 2010 midterm elections that put the Republicans back in control of the House after four years under the Democrats.
In his speech the day before Boehner’s announcement, the pope decried the partisan and ideological warfare that now often defines and paralyzes the American political system.
“The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps,” Francis said. “We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within.”
Yet, if anything, that polarization appears to be accelerating with the approach of the 2016 presidential election and a GOP primary season in which the most strident candidate, real estate mogul Donald Trump, is currently in the lead.
Even those who had been working to unseat Boehner, however, were taken aback at the suddenness of his announcement, which he made to his senior staff members at a meeting Friday morning, then to full GOP House membership.
He said he had to tell McCarthy five times before the second-ranking member of the House GOP leadership would believe him.
At the news conference, Boehner said he had been considering stepping down at the end of last year but that those plans had been derailed by the surprise defeat of then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., in a Republican primary.
More recently, he had thought that he might make his retirement announcement on Nov. 17 of this year, which will be his 66th birthday.
But, he said, after hearing the pope’s address “last night, I started to think about this. And this morning, I woke up and I said my prayers, as I always do, and I decided, you know, today’s the day I’m going to do this. As simple as that.”
He added that the first person he told was his wife, Deborah, whose reaction was one word: “Good.”
The arc of Boehner’s 25-year career in the House traces a particularly turbulent period for the institution. The job of speaker used to be one of great job security, but Boehner is the sixth in a row to leave it amid political reversals or scandal.
What makes Boehner different, however, is the fact that the pressures that led to his ouster came strictly from within his party, rather than being engineered by the opposing one.
Boehner demurred on how his leadership will be remembered.
“I was never in the legacy business,” he said.
“But people know me as being fair, being honest, being straightforward and trying to do the right thing every day on behalf of the country,” Boehner added. “I don’t need any more than that.”
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Conservatives cheer the news • The news of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation brought hundreds of religious conservatives to their feet to cheer — and one after another, much of the Republican Party’s presidential class joined Friday in their rejoicing.
“I’m not here to bash anyone, but the time has come to turn the page,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who shared the stunning development with the crowd at the annual Value Voters forum in Washington, where the rowdy cheers spanned 30 seconds.
Emboldened Tea Party leaders across the nation celebrated, too, on a remarkable day for a GOP starkly divided between its ardent ideologues and its pragmatic establishment. With less than five months before Iowa’s presidential caucuses, Boehner’s downfall served as a victory for its conservative wing and a rallying cry for those who seek to ride its frustrations to the White House.
“If we are splintered, a moderate establishment candidate runs up the middle with 23 percent of the vote, steals the nomination and then loses to Hillary Clinton in the general election,” said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “We have a simple task before us. If conservatives unite, we win.”
Voters stunned in Ohio • CINCINNATI — People in the Ohio district that House Speaker John Boehner has represented for decades were stunned Friday by his decision to step down, 35 years after he first won election there as township trustee.
Some said they understood why he was ready to leave Congress, although the timing caught them off guard.
“It’s the end of a great run of leadership, from the time when he was first elected,” said Harry Prestanski, a veterans’ issues advocate in Boehner’s home West Chester Township, a northern Cincinnati suburb. “These last few years, he’s come under a great deal of attacks … He’s shown remarkable resilience over these years.”
Cincinnati Tea Party leader Ann Becker, also of West Chester, has been critical of Boehner over such issues as the national debt and the federal role in education. She had been hearing speculation he would step down, but not until after the 2016 elections.
“I’ve been disappointed in Speaker Boehner’s performance in the past and look forward to a new future and a new representative for the district,” she said.
Trump rips congressional leaders • Real estate mogul Donald Trump, who has ridden a wave of frustration with politics and anyone with ties to government to front-runner status in the GOP’s presidential contest, called Republican congressional leaders like Boehner “babies.”
“We are so disappointed with the Republican establishment,” Trump said. The billionaire suggested that while some people may like Boehner personally, “we want people who are going to get it done.”
President calls speaker a patriot • WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama praised Boehner as a patriot who was aware of the virtues of compromise.
“He has kept his word when he made a commitment,” Obama said.
“He is somebody who has been gracious. And I think maybe most importantly, he’s somebody who understands that in government, in governance, you don’t get 100 percent of what you want, but you have to work with people who you disagree with — sometimes strongly — in order to do the people’s business.”
Former Senate Republican leader Bob Dole also credited Boehner’s teamwork.
“Since his election to leadership, he has unfortunately been plagued by a group of Republican naysayers, including one from Kansas … I doubt this group of obstructionists will be supportive of whomever succeeds John as speaker, but we can always hope they will become team players.”
Denver Post wire services
