What Is John Boehner Scared Of?

By Jonathan Alter, The New Yorker

06 October 13

At bottom, politics is always personal, so to understand why the current governing crisis isn't likely to be resolved any time soon, we need to know a little more about House Speaker John Boehner. He's the reason the government is still shut down. All he has to do is allow a vote on the House floor on the continuing resolution (a parliamentary term for a stop-gap spending measure, now entering the language) and it reopens. There's no problem in the Senate this time, and there are enough House Republicans to join with House Democrats and pass a "clean C.R."-one without various anti-Obamacare measures attached-despite opposition from the hardcore conservatives. So why doesn't Boehner allow a simple up-or-down vote?

Boehner is especially ill-equipped to show some guts just now, for reasons that relate to his history in the House. The public mostly knows him as a politician with a permanent tan and occasional tears. Biographical sketches stress his youth spent working in his father's bar and his love of golf and the Weather Channel. But there's also a little-known, traumatizing moment in his political career that took place fifteen years ago.

Upon arriving in Congress, in 1991, Boehner quickly became the leader of a rebel faction called the "Gang of Seven" that used overdrafts at the now defunct House bank to discredit the Democratic majority that had controlled the chamber for forty years. After the Republicans took control, in 1994, the new House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, rewarded Boehner by bringing him into the leadership as chairman of the Republican Conference, the fourth-ranking position in the House. He quickly shelved some of his more radical ideas-abolishing the Department of Education and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration-but he remained more conservative than the garden-variety country-club Republicans who still populated Capitol Hill. In 1995, he was caught passing out checks from the tobacco lobby on the House floor. While he later apologized, the incident did nothing to harm him inside the Republican caucus.

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