House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) know each other very well. They aren’t close personal friends — no one can recall the last meal they had together — but they talk strategy and tactics on a regular basis.
But they struggle with each other’s institution. In McConnell’s Senate, order, precedent and parliamentary procedure reign supreme. In Boehner’s House, anything goes.
That’s how it played out — again — during the final hours of debate on President Obama’s immigration orders and funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The Senate is set to pass Friday a full-year funding plan for the department, stripping the House-approved riders that eliminated funding to implement the controversial immigration actions.
In response, rather than simply submit to the Senate, Boehner’s leadership team rallied support late Thursday for a three-week extension of current DHS funding levels. With that move, Boehner will have won the right to continue fighting on an issue that divides Republicans, without much likelihood of success.
“We have two different institutions that don’t have the same body temperature every day. And so, you know, we tend to try to work to narrow the differences,” Boehner told reporters Thursday, reflecting on the eight years he and McConnell have led their respective caucuses.
“Sometimes there are differences. You know, the House, by nature and by design, is a hell of a lot more rambunctious place than the Senate — much more.”
This isn’t the image that the two men projected when McConnell’s Republicans seized the Senate in the November midterm elections and Boehner’s majority grew to the largest any GOP speaker had seen since the Hoover administration.
They secured a spending compromise for almost all of the federal government in December that divided Democrats because of a policy rider that benefited big banks. They predicted that full Republican control over Congress would force Obama to accept more conservative initiatives, inviting “60 Minutes” to a joint interview last month.
Instead, in the last 72 hours, McConnell’s Senate decided to throw the equivalent of a political hand grenade into the House, and Boehner’s House is trying to throw it right back. In private meeting Wednesday morning, Boehner even told his GOP rank-and-file that he and McConnell hardly talk, that they had gone two weeks without a single discussion.
Despite this outward appearance, their friends and allies said the relationship is sound. The issues that led them to this impasse have more to do with the historical rift between the House and Senate.
Their staffs continue to work closely — McConnell’s chief of staff sits approximately 150 feet from Boehner’s chief of staff — and sometimes the rivalry is mostly for show. Did they really go two weeks without talking? Yes, but that’s because Congress was mostly out of session and their aides were in constant contact. The two leaders huddled for 41 minutes on Wednesday in McConnell’s office.
Friends say Boehner, 65, made the quip as a bluff to his House troops to signal that he wouldn’t get rolled by McConnell, 73.
“There are probably advantages to John having made that statement to his conference. I don’t think he would have made it for any other reason,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Boehner’s closest friend in the Senate and an ally of McConnell’s.
Each took over in 2007, when Republicans were in the political wilderness. For three more years it seemed as if Democrats would rule Washington in perpetuity. Aides said they forged a bond in those early years with a common understanding that their only chance was unity in their shrunken ranks.
Boehner proudly got every Republican to oppose Obama’s $800 billion stimulus in 2009, and McConnell held all 40 Republicans together and forced all 60 Democrats through parliamentary hoops to approve Obama’s health-care law.
Boehner rode the tea party wave to the majority in the 2010 midterms, only to see dozens of those young Republicans regularly rebel against him as overly compromising. McConnell waited for his brass ring for years longer than Boehner, and less than two months into McConnell’s reign he’s stuck in a spot like the one Boehner has occupied for four years now.
Personally, the two leaders are a real-life odd couple.
Boehner is the second-oldest of 12 children, always talking about growing up in his father’s bar outside Cincinnati. McConnell, an only child, overcame polio in his early years largely through his mother’s help while his father served in World War II.
An extrovert, Boehner cries openly at the mere mention of heroism, patriotism or childhood poverty. He enjoys merlot, Camel cigarettes and 18 holes of golf. He came to politics later in life as his plastics business battled local taxes.
Aides to McConnell, an introvert, still cringe at the one time he wept in public — during a 2010 speech for a departing staffer who’d been like a son to him. McConnell played baseball at high school, but otherwise his favorite social spot is in front of his TV watching the University of Louisville play basketball and football. He was drawn to politics in his teenage years.
Those differences make them, respectively, the ultimate creatures of their respective institutions: Boehner, the emotional leader; McConnell, the passionless analyst.
Those who have served with both men say that is their strength and their weakness. McConnell, the hardened realist, sometimes looks at every angle and decides it’s time to cut a deal. Boehner, the optimist whose favorite quip is being “born with the glass half-full,” never wants to give up.
In July 2011, as Boehner spent weeks trying to cinch a $4 trillion debt deal with Obama, McConnell saw failure coming and drew up a complicated parliamentary move to increase the Treasury’s authority to borrow money. It drew immediate scorn from House conservatives, and in the end Boehner helped get more than $2 trillion in budget savings, but only after McConnell brokered the final deal, including his complicated maneuver to avert a default on the federal debt.
Former congressional leaders trace the current mess to the breakdown of what is known as “regular order,” in which the two chambers pass separate bills long before any deadline and they get to a House-Senate conference to hammer out the differences.
“We do our thing, let them do their thing. Don’t be criticizing them because of what they do or don’t do,” Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the Senate majority leader from 1996 to 2001, said he used to tell his rank and file. “And then we shall meet between the two and work the deal out. Don’t worry about what happens here or there; we’ll fix it in conference.”
The “fix it in conference” ethos has all but disappeared in Congress, where the most routine legislative issues go right up against, and then sometimes past, deadlines.
In late January Boehner sent McConnell a bill that was too conservative to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, particularly after Boehner allowed an amendment that repealed a 2012 order from Obama that protected certain teenage children brought here illegally from deportation. It gave the speaker cover with his far-right flank but left McConnell no chance of getting any Democratic support.
After a few tries McConnell declared the Senate “stuck” a few weeks ago, trying to prod House Republicans to send over a different measure. They wouldn’t budge.
Finally, on Monday McConnell announced he was separating the fight over the immigration orders from the DHS funding. He told a couple of reporters it was “pretty obvious” what he was doing — he had analyzed the situation and knew it was time to cut bait.
Boehner, still trying to work an angle, refused to give up. Despite McConnell’s doubts at success, Boehner wants three more weeks to try to get a better deal.
“You know,” the speaker said Thursday, “he has his challenges, and I have mine.”
Paul Kane covers Congress and politics for the Washington Post.
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