In his soon to be released book, former Republican Speaker of the House and wannabe spokesperson for Ernest & Julio Gallo John Boehner lists an expected number of actions undertaken not for policy or ethics, but purely partisan reason–like the Clinton impeachment.
The episode that demonstrates the Republicans’ utmost disregard for law and order and their penchant for violence was the time a Republican member of the House pulled a knife on him while he was on the floor of the House.
Boehner had just made a speech on the floor of the House decrying funding pet projects in Alaska when Alaskan Republican Congressman Don Young pulled a knife in a heated argument and held it to Boehner’s throat.
“Sometimes I can still feel that thing against my throat,” Mr. Boehner writes, according to the New York Times.
Another fun memory of Boehner’s is the time then-North Carolina Republican Congressman Mark Meadows, the future Chief of Staff for Donald Trump, fell to his knees to beg Boehner’s forgiveness after the Tea Party caucus tried to oust him as Speaker.
“Not long after the vote — a vote that like many of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts ended in abject failure — I was told that Meadows wanted to meet with me one-on-one,” Mr. Boehner recalled. “Before I knew it, he had dropped off the couch and was on his knees. Right there on my rug. That was a first. His hands came together in front of him as if he were about to pray. ‘Mr. Speaker, please forgive me,’ he said, or words to that effect.”
Mr. Boehner says he wondered, in the moment, what Mr. Meadows’s “elite and uncompromising band of Freedom Caucus warriors would have made of their star organizer on the verge of tears, but that wasn’t my problem.”
“I took a long, slow drag of my Camel cigarette,” he writes. “Let the tension hang there a little, you know? I looked at my pack of Camels on the desk next to me, then I looked down at him, and asked (as if I didn’t know): ‘For what?’”