Opinion: John Boehner’s tears don’t make up for this

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Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including his forthcoming co-edited work, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN  — 

During the unveiling of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s official portrait on Wednesday, former Speaker John Boehner shed some tears while paying tribute to Pelosi.

For anyone who has followed his career, this wasn’t much of a surprise. Boehner is known to get weepy and has no problem with public displays of emotion.

“Madam Speaker, you and I have disagreed politically on many things over the years, but we were never disagreeable to each other,” Boehner said during the ceremony. In what has become a familiar ritual among many politicians of yore, he looked back nostalgically on the time that he was in office, when the two parties allegedly got along, and politics was more civil.

It seems the 2010s are the new 1980s, which were once the new 1950s – the mythical period when political adversaries fought during the day but were still capable of getting together in the evening for a drink.

The problem is that those ideas about the good old days belie how deep-rooted the polarization in Washington, DC, has been. Certainly, anyone who remembers the Obama years would be hard-pressed to think of the period as calm or harmonious. Indeed, the political turbulence of this period overwhelmed then-candidate Barack Obama’s famous victory speech in 2008 that there was not a red America and a blue America, but a United States of America.

It turned out he was wrong. The fault lines between the parties have been enduring. Obama soon learned that congressional Republicans would be unyielding in their opposition to his agenda and willing to deploy the most ruthless tactics necessary to achieve their goals.

It’s not only that Boehner is harking back to a past that didn’t really exist during his tenure. It’s that in doing so, he continues to avoid taking responsibility for his own role in the radicalization of the Republican Party.

Ever since the former Speaker left his post, he has been on a campaign to separate himself from the younger generation of Republicans whose slash-and-burn tactics have brought a new level of toxicity to Capitol Hill. He has taken to calling Republicans like Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas “political terrorists.” He also published a memoir last year that provided a blistering account of what these political renegades were doing behind the scenes when he was in power, depicting himself as a voice of reason who sought to contain them. “None of us were crazy” he wrote of his generation, “well most of us weren’t anyway – and we also knew our limits.”

This is a familiar narrative. Older Republicans blame younger Republicans for what has happened to the party. But they fail to acknowledge the ways the Republican establishment has repeatedly opened the doors for younger and more aggressive members of the party who are eager to push the smashmouth partisan approach even further than their predecessors.

It was Republican leaders like Boehner who allowed these newcomers to gain a foothold in Washington, DC, ultimately sacrificing governance and the health of our democratic institutions in the name of partisan power. In doing so, they allowed extremism to flourish until the inevitable moment when they themselves were sacrificed for being too moderate.

Boehner was part of a generation of Republicans who joined then-Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia in going after elders like House Minority Leader Robert Michel on the grounds that they had become too comfortable in the nation’s capital. Boehner was a loyal acolyte of Gingrich, the leader of the group which argued that the GOP had to stop worrying about things like civility and bipartisanship, instead embracing a do-anything and say-anything approach that finally led the GOP to wrest control of the House in 1994 for the first time in more than four decades. Gingrich gradually found receptive leaders, including Michel, who held their noses at the tactics of his generation but came to believe that their methods might very well bring them the majority.

Practically, they were right, and Republicans elected Gingrich to be the Speaker of the House in 1995. But Gingrich and his allies set the GOP down a path that culminated in former President Donald Trump.

During the 2010 midterms, with Republicans railing against Obama and his “radical” domestic agenda, Boehner offered strong support to the Tea Party. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010, he praised the Tea Party. “While the other side is mocking tea partiers and calling them names,” he said, “we’re going to work with them, listen with them and stand amongst them…”

Boehner was ultimately rewarded with the speakership after Tea Party Republicans were victorious in the 2010 midterms. And once they were in power, the Tea Party made Gingrich’s generation look tame. When they threatened to not raise the debt ceiling in 2011 in a move that could have sent the nation into financial default, Boehner did not do enough to stop them, despite realizing the danger they posed.

And while Boehner acknowledged Obama’s US citizenship, he didn’t repudiate members of his party who took a deep dive into birtherism. He was also more than comfortable in a party that demonized Pelosi with fierce and misogynistic attacks during almost every election cycle since former President George W. Bush was in office.

In 2014, he said, “I think the tea party has brought great energy to our political process.” Seeking to downplay talk of a civil war in the party, he said, “There’s not that big a difference between what you call the tea party and your average conservative Republican.” He helped normalize his colleagues as a reasonable part of the party’s political coalition.

Regardless of Boehner’s own political preferences, his legacy remains: as speaker, he tolerated new, radical forces within his party that eroded our politics and democracy. Between 2011 and 2015, Boehner repeatedly acquiesced to this faction, giving the Tea Party, which later morphed, at least in part, into the Freedom Caucus, a path to power.

Upon leaving office, Obama certainly understood his own experience this way. “We’ve seen this coming,” he told the New Yorker’s David Remnick, trying to explain how Trump ended up as president, “Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years … we’ve seen it for eight years, even with reasonable people like John Boehner, who, when push came to shove, wouldn’t push back against these currents.”

The Republican establishment has continued opening those doors. In more recent times, congressional leaders like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have made peace with the Trumpian Republicans who promote a destructive style of politics and stoked the election lies that led to the horrendous events that unfolded on January 6, 2021. While McCarthy and McConnell often complain about their more extreme colleagues, they haven’t done much to stop them. This is the reason a legislator like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia could find herself in a position of power come January.

Boehner can cry all he wants, but those tears should really be about what he himself helped do to Congress. And until Republicans in power use the political capital necessary to reverse the direction that their party has taken, nothing will change.