John Boehner of Ohio has won a surprise victory over Roy Blunt in their bid to replace Tom DeLay as majority leader.
Boehner’s coup is all the more suprising because he was declared dead eight years ago. From the Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 19, 1998:
Ohioan John Boehner’s rise through the Republican ranks in the House of Representatives was meteoric. His fall was just as fast.
Boehner, who rode the 1994 Republican revolution into the party’s House leadership, was caught in another uprising yesterday.
Boehner, of West Chester, rose to prominence in the early 1990s as part of an aggressive Republican group that attacked the Democratic leadership’s handling of the House bank scandal. He also was campaign manager for Newt Gingrich’s effort to become House speaker and was rewarded with election as GOP conference chairman in only his third term.
But just as Boehner followed Gingrich into power after the 1994 election, he rode Gingrich’s coattails to defeat following the GOP’s worse-than-expected showing in the Nov. 3 vote. Gingrich, of Georgia, announced three days later that he would step down as speaker and leave the House.
Boehner fought to save his job but was defeated by Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, the only black Republican House member and part of the class of Republicans elected to Congress in 1994.
Ironically, Boehner was partly undone because of unethical behavior.
Boehner…was criticized for distributing campaign contribution checks from tobacco concerns on the House floor. Republicans changed the rules this session to prohibit passing out campaign checks in and around the House chamber.
Back on October 11th, 1998, Bob Herbert wrote:
You want ethics? Pull the clips on Mr. Gingrich and learn how not to behave. Or check out John Boehner of Ohio, chairman of the House Republican Conference. I wrote a column in 1996 describing how he took money from tobacco lobbyists and handed it out to certain of his colleagues on the floor of the House, while the House was in session.
These are men who couldn’t find the high road if they approached it by parachute.
Herbert was right about the ethics of the House Republicans in 1998. But, now, eight years later the Republicans have selected John Boehner to repair the damage done by the DeLay faction that seized power when Boehner was shoved aside.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a oolumn entitled “BOEHNER RAISES HYPOCRISY TO AN ART FORM” back in 1996.
Sometimes you get the feeling that politicians think we’re all a bunch of brain-dead yahoos who won’t notice when their behavior turns sleazy, self-serving, stupid or hypocritical.
How else to explain the recent behavior of Ohio Rep. John Boehner, chairman of the House Republican Conference and my candidate for the 1996 Frank Gaul Gall Award?
Last Sunday, Boehner was one of those GOP stalwarts fulminating about the AFL-CIO’s plan to spend $35 million campaigning against congressional Republicans. Like many of his conservative colleagues, Boehner is upset that the labor movement, whose political influence has dwindled in recent years, would attempt to regain its lost clout through vigorous political action.
“They are becoming extinct, and they are trying to save themselves,” an outraged Boehner told The Plain Dealer. “It is low, gutter politics at its worst.”
Well, now. That’s mighty strong talk for a guy who, according to a story in the previous day’s Plain Dealer, distributed campaign checks from a tobacco PAC on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives one day last June.
Let me get this straight: It’s wrong for an organization representing 13.1 million workers to seek to influence the electoral process by buying ads, distributing literature, running phone banks and get-out-the-vote programs. But it’s OK for purveyors of a product that kills millions of Americans each year to stuff the pockets of GOP politicians at the very moment they’re supposed to be conducting the public business.
I guess the point is that if you want to be heard on Capitol Hill, you should cut out those pesky and unpredictable middlemen, the voters, and send money directly to such paragons of integrity as Boehner and his claque of tobacco toadies.
Oops! That’s the not the point, after all. Seems that Boehner’s playing sugar daddy on the House floor was too much, even for some of his colleagues. Oklahoma Congressman Steve Largent, whose sense of propriety has not been entirely dulled by political life, was one of several colleagues who asked him to knock it off.
“They were appalled by it,” Boehner admitted to the Associated Press. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I can imagine why somebody would be upset. It sure doesn’t look good.
The Plain Dealer could recycle that headline tomorrow. It applies to the entire GOP.
