WASHINGTON — There’s still a lot President Obama wants to do before he leaves the White House in early 2017, and as the nation’s capital processed the surprise resignation of House Speaker John Boehner, Obama and his allies wondered aloud what impact the end of the Boehner era will have on the end of the Obama era.
In short, they don’t know. But they don’t think it’s good.
“First guess: Harder,” former top Obama adviser David Axelrod told BuzzFeed News when asked if Boehner’s resignation would make life easier or tougher for the administration moving forward.
That Boehner wanted to leave was widely known around town. That he would do it in the middle of his term, a year before a presidential election year while conservative criticism of both his leadership in the House and Mitch McConnell’s in the Senate was reaching a fever pitch, was not. The timing leaves the Republicans to choose a new leader.
Obama long ago moved away from attempting to cut deals for big legislation with the Republican-controlled Congress toward a “pen-and-phone” executive action-focus White House that tries to leave an Obama legacy on many parts of government and policy largely without Congress. That will likely continue into the post-Boehner House, though some in the White House worry that a Congress without him could be even tougher to deal with than the House with him has been.
The White House fear is that an already unfriendly Congress could become more unpredictable. With things as they are, Obama strongly signalled that he’s not expecting much from the changing of the guard in the House. At a press conference at the White House Friday, he took pains to say “I’m not going to pre-judge who the next Speaker will be,” while also suggesting there isn’t a big untapped compromise wing in the House GOP waiting to be unleashed.
“It’s not as if there’s been a multitude of areas where the House Republican caucus has sought cooperation previously,” Obama told reporters at a White House press conference Friday. “So I don’t necessarily think there’s going to be a big shift.”
Obama praised Boehner in the press conference, saying that the two men are “politically opposite ends of the spectrum,” but saying the House speaker had always perpetuated “courtesy and civility.”
“John Boehner is a good man. He is a patriot, he cares deeply about the house, he cares about his constituents and he cares about America,” Obama said. He said he would reach out “immediately” to whomever House Republicans choose to lead them next, and urged that person not to return to the policies government shutdowns and fights over the debt limit that had defined Boehner’s tenure.
One former top aide said it was too soon to know how things would shake out. “To be honest, I don't have a great sense of it yet,” the aide said.