Hard Times for Boehner

Adult birth control is uncontroversial by American standards. The Department of Health and Human Services relied on this broad support when they promulgated a rule requiring that employers and group insurance plans cover contraceptive care without co-pays. They were even going to give religious non-profits a year to start providing contraceptive services. (This was later revised so religious organizations wouldn’t have to directly pay for birth control.) Although there’s room for reasonable disagreement about religious freedom versus women’s right to health care, the rule tracked with popular sentiment. It seemed benign.

So, you might have been surprised when John Boehner lit up the House of Representatives Wednesday and cast this rule as an attack on religious freedom. Most states already have identical requirements (New York, for one), and, well, this is contraception, not abortion. A national politician decrying the availability of contraception to adult women is just so 1962. But this should come as no surprise, because this is John Boehner.

John Boehner has no sense of proportion. He is perpetually discovering a great shattering truth. Everything is the biggest deal ever and he’s always amazed when it happens, even if it was months in the making, even if it already happened last year—it doesn’t matter. Each new iteration of Things That Happen is just as shocking and incredible.

If there’s a news camera or some sliver of momentary political advantage then Boehner becomes a protagonist in a daytime soap suffering recurrent amnesia. Every few months he will learn that Raul is cheating on Clarabelle. He will emote with great globs of orange tears. He will gasp, yell and stamp. He is a telenovela. Boehner reacts and he feels, episodically, repeatedly.

The issue doesn’t matter. H.R. XYZ, A Bill to Require Certain Classes of Boring Government Stuff be Recorded in Garamond Font and also Maybe Italicized Where Fancy, may seem innocuous. But John Boehner is always a sound bite or a focus-group-tested phrase from flipping out. He will suddenly realize that tyranny begins with obscure elitist fonts. He will cry out that even Times New Roman was a bridge too far and he will roar the real American people’s demand for true freedom writ in the common people’s Comic Sans.

Boehner’s antics have served him well. America’s been deeply unsettled, wracked by an economy best described with terrifying metaphors. Everything seemed to be going wrong all at once, and suddenly this new President was different… somehow. Boehner had the good timing of bad times. He had an entire exploding universe of scenery to chew for an audience so confused and terrified that even his goofiest antics didn’t seem that out of step.

Lately, though, Boehner’s stage persona has grown less and less viable. The economy has gone from death rattling to stably comatose and America’s only in one seemingly endless war of foreign occupation. Encouragingly, the President has yet to reveal himself as the Antichrist or a vampire. Hell, the news over the past several weeks has been a combination of the Super Bowl and the American auto industry mounting a comeback. Clint Eastwood even had a commercial during the Super Bowl about the American auto industry mounting a comeback. Things are growing less terrifying.

But good times are bad for Boehner. The Boehner we know and love has to dial it up to 11 over the prospect of changes to legal presumptions in health insurance contracting. He can’t change his character now without breaking the illusion and betraying his audience. Even if times become good, or even merely OK, he must remain comfortably apocalyptic. If he doesn’t, he’s just not John Boehner anymore. He would become a stranger to his base, an imposter in a technicolor weeping suit, a pretender to the emotional freak-outs of a greater man. If things improve, then as they improve, John Boehner must either disappear or grow increasingly absurd.

His masque also requires avoiding any display of basic long-term memory, let alone historical understanding. In order to maintain the illusion of Boehner, he can never accept that an issue is dead or settled. Lesser performers may take the easy road. They may choose not to re-open a probably miscalculated political slap fight about adult women having access to contraceptive care.

Boehner can’t make that choice. If people see him exercising discretion, he shatters the fourth wall. To stay in character, he must replace history with histrionics every time. When confronted with a political question, Boehner can’t ask, “What should I do?” He must ask, “What should John Boehner, beloved American political television character, do?" Boehner must cling to his performance like a life preserver in choppy waters. He is an actor of necessity.

That necessity is all-consuming. It drove Boehner to rush out half-prepared and define his party’s position in the most hyperbolic terms possible, on a Wednesday, allowing the president to have the last word on a Friday and define the issue for weekend coverage. It drove him to not only allow Obama to stand with public opinion, but to do so while being the more reasonable party, offering a “compromise” which the exact same practical effect. It drove him off a cliff.

But it should come as no surprise. Sure, it was just a cynical sop and plays horribly with the vast majority of Americans. It’s intensely stupid, short-sighted politics. But there was no other way to play this. He’s John Boehner, America’s first vaudeville Speaker of the House. The curtain rose, and he danced.

Randolph Brickey is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School. He is currently underemployed and preparing for the Virginia Bar Exam. He can be reached at brickeyrc@gmail.com.