John Boehner

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares149 Views

    Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticisms

    by

    Republican senator Ted Cruz has responded to fiery criticism from John Boehner with a tactic beloved of authoritarian regimes: threatening to burn his book.In an email to supporters, the Texas politician said he also might machine-gun or chainsaw the memoir, depending on how much his supporters paid for the privilege to watch.Boehner, a Republican congressman from Ohio for 24 years and House speaker from 2011 to 2015, published his book On the House this week. It contains strong criticism of political figures from Donald Trump to Barack Obama but hits Cruz especially hard.The senator who drove a government shutdown in 2013 is “Lucifer in the flesh”, Boehner has said.On the page, he writes: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”The book also contains a memorable sign-off: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”But Cruz, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and may well do so again in 2024, is nothing if not a bomb-thrower himself, as well as a nimble opportunist.“John Boehner doesn’t like me much,” his fundraising email said. “That’s fine, I’m not a big fan of his either.”Calling the speaker-turned-lobbyist a “Swamp Monster” and accusing him of “an unhinged smear campaign”, the email told supporters Cruz had “put this trash right where it belonged, in my fireplace”.“But I didn’t finish it off just yet,” it added. Instead, the Texas senator announced a “72-hour drive to raise $250,000”, in which donors would “get to VOTE on whether we machine gun the book, take a chainsaw to it or burn the book to light cigars!”The email also said Cruz would livestream the evisceration or incineration.There is nothing new about American politicians shooting or eviscerating texts they don’t like in order to raise campaign dollars. Ask the Democratic senator Joe Manchin, who has both taken aim at Obamacare and fired his gun to defend it.But it could also be pointed out that Cruz’s attempt to stoke outrage – and dollars – might only succeed in bringing Boehner’s book to wider attention.As Ray Bradbury, author of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, about a society which bans books, once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”On Thursday morning, On the House was the No 1 seller on Amazon. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      On the House review: John Boehner’s lament for pre-Trump Republicans

      by

      In October 2015, John Boehner abruptly vacated the speaker’s chair. Confronted by a hyper-caffeinated Freedom Caucus, the Ohio congressman announced his retirement singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. He walked before they made him run.By all indications, Boehner is happier on the outside – advising high-priced clients, pushing marijuana liberalization. The distance between Boehner’s unfiltered Camel cigarettes and Kona Gold is shorter than the chasm between the Republicans and Coca-Cola.Against the backdrop of the Trump-induced insurrection of 6 January, On the House delivers a merlot-hued indictment of Republican excesses and heaps praise on those who play the game with aplomb – regardless of party.Nancy Pelosi gets props for “gutting” the late John Dingell, a senior midwest Democrat, like a “halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay”. Boehner posits that Pelosi may be the most powerful speaker ever.Likewise, Mitch McConnell receives a shoutout even after dressing down the author, saying: “I’ll never presume to know more about the House than you do. And trust me, you’ll never know as much about the Senate as I do.” Boehner offers no pushback.Boehner expresses contempt for Senator Ted Cruz and Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became Donald Trump’s final chief of staff. As for Flyin’ Ted, Boehner is unsparing: “There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else.”PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourselfNot surprisingly, Boehner finds the Cruz-led government shutdown of 2013 to have been senseless. On the other hand, the GOP recaptured the Senate a year later. Regardless, one audio clip of Boehner reading On the House concludes: “PS, Ted Cruz: Go fuck yourself.”As for Meadows, Boehner campaigned for him, only for Meadows to oppose Boehner’s election as speaker, then offer a surprising, moist-eyed apology.“I wondered what his elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears,” Boehner writes. “But that wasn’t my problem.”On the House also serves bits of vaguely remembered history, like Boehner’s attempt to make the late justice Antonin Scalia Bob Dole’s Republican running mate against Bill Clinton in 1996. Boehner met with Scalia. Scalia was open to the idea but Dole picked Jack Kemp, a former quarterback, congressman and cabinet officer. The senator from Kansas did Scalia a favor. Dole lost badly.More puzzling is Boehner’s continued embrace of Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president and a former Wyoming congressman. In Boehner’s words, Cheney was a “phenomenal partner” for the younger Bush and the two made a “great team”. He makes no mention of Cheney’s role in the run-up to the Iraq war, though he does detail his own deliberations on voting to authorize the Gulf war under Bush Sr.By the time George W’s time in the White House was done, his relationship with Cheney had grown distant and strained. The marriage of convenience reached its end. Perhaps Boehner knows something Cheney’s old boss doesn’t.On the House offers a clearer assessment of Newt Gingrich’s skillset and foibles. Like Boehner, Gingrich was speaker. He was also responsible for ending decades of Democratic control of the House. But Boehner crystalizes Gingrich’s inability to help run a co-equal branch of government. Politics isn’t always tethered to bomb-throwing. Governing is about the quotidian. Gingrich couldn’t be bothered.The book acknowledges the visceral hostility of the Republican base toward Barack Obama. After Boehner announced that he believed that Obama was born in the US, he caught a blizzard of grief. The GOP’s embrace of fringe theories remains.Boehner describes his attempts to reach compromises with Obama on “fiscal issues” and immigration. On the former, he acknowledges Obama’s efforts. On the latter, he contends that Obama would “phone it in” and “poison the well” for the sake of partisan advantage.Based upon the 2016 election, Obama bet wrong. Open borders are a losing proposition. On the other hand, so is opposing the Affordable Care Act amid an ongoing pandemic and the aftermath of the great recession. Specifically, Boehner claims credit for dismantling Obamacare “bit by bit”, pointing to the rollback of the medical device tax. Incredibly, he claims “there really isn’t much of Obamacare left.”Really? Boehner definitely gets this wrong.The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of uninsured non-elderly Americans dropped from more than 46.5 million in 2010 to under 29 million in 2019. Also, about 9 million purchase subsidized health insurance with federal premium assistance.If the theatrics of the Trump administration and the Republican challenge pending before the supreme court teach us anything, it is that Obamacare is very much alive. When it comes to government spending, the Republican donor and voting bases don’t necessarily sing from the same hymnal.Like most people, Boehner’s relationship with Trump ended worse than it began. Early on, Trump reached out. Less so with the passing of time. Boehner chalked that up to Trump getting comfortable in his job but also surmises: “He just got tired of me advising him to shut up.”Days after the insurrection but before the Biden inauguration, Boehner said Trump should consider resigning. The 45th president had “abused the loyalty of the people who voted for him” and incited a riot.Boehner admits that he was unprepared for the aftermath of Trump’s defeat. The insurrection “should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity”. It wasn’t. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from QAnon, has amassed a $3.2m re-election war chest. “The legislative terrorism” Boehner had witnessed helped birth “actual terrorism”.Boehner is confident about Americans, “the most versatile people God put on earth”. As for the survival of the American conservative movement, he is less optimistic. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s obsession with Deep State conspiracy 'delusional', John Boehner says

      by

      Donald Trump’s obsession with the Deep State conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent secret government of bureaucrats and intelligence officials existed to thwart his agenda in office, was destructive and delusional, John Boehner says in a new book.“Let me be diplomatic here,” the former speaker writes in the memoir, On the House. “That’s horseshit.”Boehner’s view chimes with that of Steve Bannon, a key propagator of the theory who was Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 and a senior White House strategist.Trump, senior aide Stephen Miller and others have repeatedly blamed the Deep State for their problems. Bannon has said the theory is “for nut cases” and “none of this is true”.Boehner was a congressman from Ohio for 24 years, a figure in the Washington firmament, House speaker from 2011 until his retirement in 2015 – a period he spent in fierce opposition to Barack Obama.His memoir will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.His criticism of Trump comes as no surprise, not least because an extract of the book ran in Politico last week. Boehner is heavily critical of Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. Leading figures in the pro-Trump establishment duly lashed back.The Fox News host Sean Hannity responded to being called “one of the worst” by tweeting: “John Boehner will go down in history as one of the worst Republican speakers in history. He’s weak, timid and what’s up with all the crying John?”Boehner was a famously lachrymose House speaker, apt to tear up in simple nostalgia or when in the presence of the pope.Hannity added: “There was not a single time I was around him when he didn’t just reek of cigarette smoke and wine breath.”Boehner plays up to his somewhat clubbable image, his cover image a portrait with wine glass and cigarette. But his rebuke over the Deep State theory, which Trump, key aides and reporters continue to espouse now he is out of power, may still sting.Boehner examines the wellsprings of the theory, writing: “The Deep State as a boogeyman is not an idea the Trump Republicans invented out of whole cloth.“As long as I’ve been in politics, politicians have railed against this group or that group in Washington as the villains standing in the way of whatever they’re trying to do. I too railed against ‘the establishment’ as a young hothead.”Boehner says there is indeed “an entrenched bureaucracy that likes to protect the status quo”. But he says posturing against it took a “nastier turn” under Trump.Even before the former president took up the lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden which was repeatedly thrown out of court but still sent supporters to storm the US Capitol, he claimed the Deep State posed “a threat to democracy itself”.Boehner calls such talk “very destructive – not to mention delusional”, and defends the work of most bureaucrats and also lobbyists.“Playing hardball or ‘creative disruption’ or whatever you want to call it can and does work sometimes,” he writes. “Knee-jerk defenders of President Trump would often say that’s what he was up to whenever there was some new pronouncement of action that didn’t make sense.“Well, they may have been right in some cases … but having to constantly point to the Deep State as this boogeyman responsible for all these problems just seems … weird.” More