Boehner’s war

Focus should be on Americans in the middle

Former Republcan House Speaker John Boehner has never cared for the right wing fringe.

Now he’s taken to warning President Donald Trump that he should be wary of that group.

In a speech in Florida reported by The Dayton Daily News, Mr. Boehner heaped praise on Mr. Trump for the 2017 tax bill, which cut corporate tax rates and nearly doubled the standard deduction, for not meddling too much in Congress’ work, and for cracking down on China’s unfair trade practices. Mr. Boehner said, “This is a fight that needs to happen.”

But he also said the 35-day partial shutdown was caused by “the goofballs on the right.” He pointed out that the shutdown morphed from an inconvenience for most Americans to a threat to public safety, as air traffic controllers refused to show up for unpaid work at LaGuardia Airport in New York.

Mr. Boehner, who retired from Congress in 2015, said “knuckleheads in Congress” urged Mr. Trump to go for broke for $5.7 billion for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The conservative caucus, he said, “did the president a total disservice.”

There is plenty of blame for the shutdown to go around — the president, the speaker of the House and now, apparently, goofballs and knuckleheads. But the former speaker makes a good point, perhaps inelegantly and indirectly: If the next two years are to be anything but a waste and a misery, both the president and the current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, need to pay attention to more than their respective political bases. They need to think about the vast number of Americans in the middle — independents, both registered and leaning — and how compromise and accomplishment appeal to them greatly.