On Sunday, in the latest round of leftist media adoration for deposed Republican figures they hated about five minutes ago, Politico ran a fawning profile of one-time Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). Boehner wasn’t a particularly successful speaker — he led the House Republicans from 2007 to 2015, as both Minority Leader and Speaker. Boehner was deposed because he was widely perceived as caving to President Obama’s funding priorities; he seemed cold on the prospect of defunding particular aspects of the government if it meant going up against Obama directly.
Boehner’s record wasn’t particularly strong. In 2008, Boehner pushed through President Bush’s bank bailout. In 2010, Boehner posed as a hard-core conservative opposed to President Obama’s agenda tooth and nail. That didn’t last long. In 2011, he undercut House Republicans on their debt ceiling push for serious spending reform; shortly afterward, Boehner cut a deal with Democrats on the Budget Control Act, also known as “sequestration.” That deal slashed $1.2 trillion from the budget from 2013 to 2021 — but instead of holding President Obama’s feet to the fire, Boehner simply rammed through a bill that would take half of those cuts from defense if no actual material cuts were agreed to. Those cuts didn’t materialize, and Obama slashed defense. In 2011, Boehner also jacked up unfunded spending on disaster relief; the next year, he tried to purge conservatives from leadership positions in the House; in 2013, he ran away from Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) short-lived government shutdown, and later called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh”; he signed off on a $1 trillion deal later that year that raised spending $63 billion without offsetting cuts; in 2014, he did little to defund Obama’s executive amnesty, instead pushing through a cromnibus bill that avoided the issue; that came shortly after he tried to ram through an immigration reform bill that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
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