Ex-speaker’s memoir pulls no punches
>>Former House speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, says in a new memoir that he regrets supporting the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, calling it a partisan attack that he now wishes he had repudiated.
In his book On the House: A Washington Memoir, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Boehner blames Rep Tom DeLay of Texas, then the No 2 Republican, for leading a politically motivated campaign against Mr Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.
The Republican-led House voted to impeach Mr Clinton on two counts in 1998. He was acquitted by the Senate. “In my view, Republicans impeached him for one reason and one reason only — because it was strenuously recommended to us by one Tom DeLay,” Boehner writes.
“Tom believed that impeaching Clinton would win us all these House seats, would be a big win politically, and he convinced enough of the membership and the GOP base that this was true. “I was on board at the time,” Boehner went on. “I won’t pretend otherwise. But I regret it now. I regret that I didn’t fight against it.”
Boehner’s memoir, whose cover features a photograph of the former speaker holding a glass of merlot, with a lit cigarette in an ashtray beside him — his natural habitat for decades — is full of colourful stories from his time in Congress.
He pulls no punches for those he views as far-right bomb-throwers in his party. And he issues a stinging denunciation of Donald Trump, saying that the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”
Mr Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” Boehner writes.
Boehner also details some of Capitol Hill’s most talked-about exchanges, including the time that Rep Don Young, R-Alaska, pulled a knife on Boehner on the House floor after a critical speech about sweetheart projects going to Alaska. “Sometimes I can still feel that thing against my throat,” Boehner writes. (The two would later patch things up, and Boehner would serve as best man in Mr Young’s wedding.)
Boehner also relays an encounter in his office in which Mark Meadows, then a Republican representative from North Carolina and a leader of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, dropped to his knees to beg for forgiveness after a political coup attempt against Boehner failed.
“Not long after the vote — a vote that like many of the Freedom Caucus’ efforts ended in abject failure — I was told that Meadows wanted to meet with me oneon-one,” Boehner recalled. “Before I knew it, he had dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray. ‘Mr Speaker, please forgive me,’ he said, or words to that effect.”
Boehner says he wondered, in the moment, what Meadows’ “elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organiser on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem.”
Boehner looks down at the man who would later become Mr Trump’s White House chief of staff. “I took a long, slow drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the tension hang there a little, you know? I looked at my pack of Camels on the desk next to me, then I looked down at him, and asked (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”
On the Jan 6 riots, he said “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”
He adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.”
Mr Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shovelling since he lost a fair election the previous November.
“He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”
The ex-speaker was also unsparing in criticism of an old foe, Sen Ted Cruz of Texas, whom he calls “dangerous” and a “reckless asshole”.
“By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash,” Boehner wrote.
“And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz.”
In 2016, Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh.” “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” Boehner said during a talk at Stanford University.