Boehner on life after being speaker: Buy a car

WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner used to have a little clapping monkey on the coffee table in his ornate Capitol Hill office — a gift given to him by an aide after he cracked that his busy schedule made him feel like a wind-up toy.

“You don’t have to be the monkey anymore,” Boehner’s scheduler told him last month, shortly after the Ohio Republican stunned the political world by announcing he planned give up the speaker’s gavel and his congressional seat. Later that day, Boehner decided to give the monkey away to three little girls, the daughters of a GOP congressman from California who were entranced by the toy when they visited the speaker’s office.

Boehner just might need that monkey back, at least temporarily.

On Thursday, as he was regaling Ohio reporters with the story of the monkey — and how he had written a letter to the girls asking them to take care of it since he was retiring — his deputy, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, dropped out of the speaker’s race and threw the House GOP conference into chaos.

Boehner found out about McCarthy’s decision only moments before the Ohio Republican was scheduled to oversee McCarthy’s widely anticipated victory as the incoming speaker, a closed-door secret ballot contest that was set to take place at noon Thursday. Instead of ushering in his successor, Boehner was forced to adjourn the GOP election and issue a statement saying he would stay on until a new speaker was elected.

It was yet another topsy-turvy moment in Boehner’s tumultuous five-year tenure as speaker.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy quits speaker race

In the session with Ohio reporters — just before that GOP meeting — Boehner brushed off a question about whether he was worried McCarthy might falter and he would be forced to stay longer than his Oct. 30 resignation date.

“I’m confident he’ll win today, and I’m confident he’ll win on Oct. 29,” Boehner said during the 30-minute session, as he smoked a Camel cigarette and talked about his accomplishments, his frustrations, and his coolest day in Congress (Pope Francis’ visit, of course).

As McCarthy was contemplating his surprise announcement, Boehner sat down in his plush leather chair and started reading through pages of his legislative achievements, as three Ohio reporters and four Boehner aides listened attentively. He talked about the businesses he worked with in Ohio’s 8th Congressional District, the constituents he helped, the voters he met.

Then he put the papers aside and went off message — at least a little bit.

On Nov. 1, Boehner said, it will be the first time since he was 8-years-old that he has not had a job. The first thing on his to-do list? Buy a car.

“I haven’t driven for nine years,” Boehner said, noting that his Capitol Police security detail does not allow it.

He has no idea what kind of car he’ll buy — or where. He said he might commute between Washington, Cincinnati, and Florida, where he and his wife own a condo. But he hasn’t decided anything yet.

“I have no idea,” Boehner said when asked if he would take a job at a lobbying firm, play more golf, or do something else entirely.

One thing he said he won’t do: be a regular on the fundraising or surrogate circuit in the 2016 elections. He said he’s a “big fan” of both Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, but “I don’t see myself heavily involved” in the 2016 race.

The Reading native said he was not leaving frustrated or disenchanted with the dysfunction in Congress or the open warfare in his own party, although he did take another shot at conservatives who have blocked many of his efforts at compromise.

“Some in the tea party don’t recognize that there are some basic facts,” he said. “We have a majority in the House, we have barely a majority in the Senate and … we’ve got Barack Obama in the White House. There are limits to what you can accomplish.”

He said he was proud of his record, touting his push to slash federal spending, trim the deficit, preserve most of the Bush-era tax cuts, and fix Medicare payments to doctors. But even as he ticked off that list of victories, he noted that many of his House GOP colleagues had voted against those measures.

“I guess it wasn’t good enough,” he said, “but these are real accomplishments.”

Boehner also defended his refusal to seek earmarks — the special provisions lawmakers used to tuck into spending bills to steer federal funding to pet projects in their home districts. Boehner eschewed earmarks from the start of his congressional career, and then helped ban them when he rose to the leadership and they became synonymous with corruption and cronyism.

Boehner said that did not limit his ability to deliver for his own constituents

“My district’s done just fine,” he said. “My district is growing, jobs are growing.”

But it did make his job as speaker more difficult, he said, “because I didn’t have candy to drop in members’ laps.”

Boehner said he did not see a way to break the partisan grip on Congress, arguing that the polarization in Washington reflects a growing division in the country, fueled by a nonstop news cycle and the Internet era.

“People are getting hundreds of times more information about their Congress than they ever got before, and the speed at which they get it is instantaneous,” he said. “It’s tended to push or pull people into one of two camps, leaving fewer and fewer people in the middle. And then you’ve got these organizations that have got these giant email lists, and they can wind people up in a heartbeat on the left and the right. And all of that tends to make it harder for this place to function.”

Boehner said he didn’t feel uncomfortable leaving now, even though there is so much unfinished business on lawmakers’ plates.

“There’s no good time to leave,” he said, not realizing that he might not be walking out the congressional door as soon as he planned. “There’s always something hanging out there.”

Asked if he has something “up his sleeve” in terms of big legislative items he hopes to get done, he said: “Of course I do. And when I do it, you’ll know it.”

He declined to elaborate, saying simply that if he could “pull people together” before he leaves, great. And if not, he said, “I guess they’ll have to figure it out on their own.”

By the end of Thursday, though, it was clear that Boehner would be the one figuring it out for the foreseeable future. No new speaker candidates had emerged by evening, and Boehner had not set a date for a new election.

And while he no longer has the monkey, he still has a little plastic alligator on his Capitol office coffee table. That’s another gift from an aide - given to him after his repeated jokes, before his weekly news conference with the Washington press corps, about how it was time “to go feed the alligators.”

“That’s the press,” Boehner quipped to the three Ohio scribes sitting in his office. “The goal is to feed the alligators without getting bit.”

For now, at least, he’ll have to keep winding himself up -- and hoping he doesn’t get bit.