John Boehner seized the speakership five years ago on a wave of anti-Obamacare sentiment that helped Republicans win the House, and Obamacare has plagued him ever since, right up until his retirement.
The Ohio Republican didn’t mention President Obama’s 2010 healthcare law as he announced Friday that he’s stepping down as a speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. But that legislation, perhaps more than any other, has tormented his tenure as he’s struggled to appease conservatives intent on picking fight after fight over the controversial law.
“I think it was a headache for sure,” said Charlotte Ivancic, a former Boehner health policy adviser who joined the lobbying firm Tarplin, Downs and Young this month.
“But if you’re speaker, you have a million problems to solve all the time,” she added. “Definitely the Affordable Care Act stuff was something that presented a real challenge to the speaker, but it wasn’t like it was an impossible task.”
Boehner presided over more than 65 votes to change or repeal the Affordable Care Act. He gave conservatives space in 2013 to insist on defunding it, even though that strategy resulted in a two-week partial government shutdown. And he led an ongoing House lawsuit against some of the law’s subsidies.
There’s no question that Boehner himself is deeply opposed to the healthcare law, giving his memorable and impassioned “hell no” speech against it before passage in the House, which at the time was led by Democrats.
“Look at how this bill was written — can you say it was done openly, with transparency and accountability? Without backroom deals and behind closed doors, hidden from the people?” he asked, his voice rising with each rhetorical question. “Hell no you can’t!”
Yet Boehner still struggled with placating Tea Party conservatives who have resented his pragmatism and willingness at times to negotiate with Democrats. Every year he’s been forced to hold a vote on repealing the entire healthcare law, even though President Obama would never agree to ditch his signature domestic reform.
And despite a resistance among some lawmakers to appear as though they were improving a law so unpopular among Republicans, former aides say Boehner pushed hard for passing smaller pieces of legislation tweaking sections of Obamacare, instead of trying over and over to repeal the whole thing.
“I think he really did strike a balance there in terms of thinking of ways to get at Obamacare without always going at it with the full repeal approach,” Ivancic said. “He was sort of the first one to lead on that.”
Boehner got pushback at times for that approach, but Ivancic says she felt it “put us on a good path of thinking through changes.”
“I think it came with the accusation that Republicans aren’t interested in full repeal anymore, but he thought about it a different way, like ‘let’s find ways to make changes to the law that are conservative,'” she said.
And then there was the effort two years led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and others to strip funding from the healthcare law by refusing to pass a government funding bill that included dollars for it. Boehner and other Republican leaders were skeptical.
“Boehner would find himself walking members through the consequences of particular tactics and try to spark a conversation about whether the end result was one that moved conservatives closer to their goals or not,” said David Schnittger, Boehner’s deputy chief of staff who joined Squire Patton Boggs earlier this year.
Ultimately, Boehner wasn’t successful in diverting conservatives from their aims, and parts of the government shuttered for two weeks before a deal was reached in which the GOP got virtually none of their Obamacare demands.
But other times, and using other tools, Boehner has been at the forefront of the Republican battle against Obamacare. He personally orchestrated a House lawsuit which charges that the administration unconstitutionally funded cost-sharing insurance subsidies and delayed the law’s employer mandate to provide workers with coverage.
Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the part of the lawsuit dealing with the subsidies can move forward for a ruling on the merits.
“I can tell you [Boehner played] a very personal role,” Schnittger said. “He became very frustrated at the overreach and the practice within the current administration of the president effectively making his own law.”
