On the House: A Washington Memoir by John Boehner

Author:John Boehner [Boehner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250238443
Google: j2BDyAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1250238447
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2021-04-12T23:00:00+00:00

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Barack Obama promised to be different. Of course they all promise that—but a lot of people believed Obama meant it. His campaign was about hope, it was about working together, about having new conversations. It was a pretty compelling message that most Americans rallied behind. I even knew Republicans who voted for Obama. His election as the first black president was historic, and he came in with enormous goodwill. I thought to myself: if he actually governs like he said he would, this is going to change Washington.

Early on, I tried to share with President Obama—who hadn’t spent that much time in the Senate, after all—how things worked on the legislative end of Pennsylvania Avenue. I told him that if you want to enact something that lasts, it has to have bipartisan fingerprints. Everyone needs a piece of it, a stake in it. The last Democrat to hold his office, Bill Clinton, understood this, and worked with Republicans to pass initiatives like welfare reform in the 1990s.

Obama had urgent priorities for sure. The economy was still suffering from the Great Recession of 2008, and he had to do something about that. So he pledged to pass a stimulus bill to reinvigorate the economy. But the president wasn’t particularly involved in crafting the bill, leaving it instead to the Democrats in Congress, where no taxpayer dollars have ever been spared. The idea was to spend a trillion dollars and boost the economy, by just throwing money at stuff. But one of the things they threw almost no money at was something that should have been hugely popular: infrastructure, meaning repairs to roads, bridges, airports, etc. And these projects were sprinkled through every congressional district in America. Republicans, just like Democrats, love to bring home federal dollars to fix a local highway or whatever needs fixing.

There was a key opportunity here for Democrats to get Republican buy-in with more infrastructure spending in the stimulus. If they had just thrown $10 or 20 billion of that stimulus money into infrastructure, they’d have brought at least 50 Republicans to join them. Obama would have started off with a big bipartisan bill and a big victory against the GOP, who were trying to keep everyone in line against the Democrats. But with the Democrats holding a majority in both the House and Senate, the White House didn’t think they had to do any outreach to Republican members.

And for some strange reason, at this same time, the new president was claiming that he wanted to work closely with us. At one point during these deliberations, he said to me and some other Republican leaders, “Listen, you guys that have got ideas, give them to me.” So we outlined some ideas and a few days later I presented them to the president.

Obama looked at the list and bristled. I never got the sense that he was a particularly warm guy, but today he was cooler than ever.

“Don’t like this,” he said as he went down the list.

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