John Boehner on House Radicals →
Politico, in the person of Jake Sherman, talked to former Speaker of the House, John Boehner. In the course of the interview, Boehner lamented the tactics of the radical Republicans that constantly battled him.
... Many of his GOP colleagues are perfectionists in a system of government that doesn’t allow for perfection, Boehner said.
“Nothing was good enough,” Boehner said, in a kind of reflective comment he never would’ve made as speaker. “When we protected 99 percent of the American people from an increase in taxes, most of my Republicans colleagues voted no. When we did the big money-saving bill, $2 trillion in 2011, half of my Republican colleagues voted no. Even when we passed these changes to Medicare earlier this year and solved the payment system for how we pay doctors for Medicare patients, which has been a problem for 15 years, and no one could solve it, [Nancy] Pelosi and I got it solved, and paid for it from these long-term changes to Medicare.
I'm not a John Boehner fan. I think he had a distinct tendency towards going along with whatever the Democrats wanted and that the radical Republicans played a necessary role in putting some steel in his spine.
But I agree with him that "nothing was good enough" for the discontented. Republicans could have had more wins than they did, had the backbenchers blown up a few fewer bills.
This entry was tagged. Government John Boehner