On his way out the door after five years as House Speaker, Rep. John Boehner touted the accomplishments of his time in office, including spending cuts, regulatory and entitlement reform, and the elimination of pork-barrel spending known as earmarks.
With no regrets, Boehner is ready to retire on Oct. 30, but says he doesn’t know what he’ll do next after working 50 to 100 hours per week for the past 40 years.
“We’ve done our best to make every moment count,” the Ohio Republican, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, said of his time at the helm of the House.
Added to the list accomplishments as speaker, Boehner said, is the sweeping, two-year budget agreement that passed the House on Wednesday.
“It’s a solid agreement and I’m proud of it,” said Boehner, 65.
The Ohio Republican met with a small group of reporters in his office Wednesday, a day before he is set to hand the gavel to his likely successor, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Boehner said Ryan is “the right person for the job.”
For the past five years, it’s been Boehner’s job, and he began it by ridding the House of earmarks, a move that may be remembered as his signature achievement.
For decades, the provisions were added to legislation to benefit the districts of individual members, often with no scrutiny and costing billions of dollars.
Earmarks were also relied upon by GOP leaders to get the rank and file to vote for legislation they might otherwise oppose. Boehner threw away that tool, contributing to some of the turmoil in the GOP that flared up during his tenure.
“It was the right thing to do,” Boehner said of the earmark ban. “Did it make my job harder? Yes.”
He said despite his exit, lawmakers eager to revive earmarks will have difficulty.
“There are a lot of people who want earmarks back,” Boehner said. “It’s going to be pretty hard to do. Once you turn that spigot off, it’s going to be pretty hard to turn it back on.”
The process, he added, “got totally out of control. I frankly thought it corrupted the legislative process.”
Boehner’s tenure was marked by frequent clashes with dozens of members on his right flank, most of whom he helped to elect by raising hundreds of millions of dollars by attending countless fundraisers across the country.
Conservatives frequently flouted the leadership, voting to sabotage the passage of important legislation and leading the government into a 16-day shutdown in 2013 that at least temporarily damaged the GOP brand.
Dozens of those conservatives defied the leadership again on Wednesday when they voted against the budget deal.
Boehner didn’t criticize conservatives, but said he believes the faction may be more willing to work with the rest of the GOP conference under the new leadership of Ryan, who “has an opportunity, a fresh start to try to build more confidence among those members.”
What does Boehner wish he had achieved? He laments not securing a debt deal with President Obama in July of 2011 that would have reformed entitlements. Boehner said he believed the deal was set with a handshake with Obama at the White House, but then it then fell apart.
“It would have really helped our economy,” Boehner said, “It would have helped our deficit, it would have meant a lot of things long term, really trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of savings over the course of 20 or 30 years.”
Boehner also blamed Obama for “poisoning the well” on immigration reform by taking executive actions to legalize millions of illegal immigrants, circumventing Congress and making many lawmakers resist immigration legislation.
“The president knew I wanted to do immigration reform,” Boehner said. “He came to understand the fact that I was going to do this in small pieces.”
Now, Boehner said, any attempt to pass immigration reform, no matter who is president, “is going to take time and effort … to heal the wounds.”
He’s offered some advice to Ryan, who agreed to run for speaker only after Boehner and other lawmakers pleaded with him to step in.
Boehner said he told Ryan “that this is the loneliest place in the world, almost as lonely as the presidency when you are in this office.”
Boehner said people stream in and out of his office all day, but they are not family or friends.
“And it’s a lonely place,” Boehner said. “What makes it even lonelier, is that at the end of the day, you have to make decisions. And those decisions have consequences. And those consequences fall back on one person.”
