Jac Wilder VerSteeg: John Boehner is latest the GOP has left behind

Well, the moment I feared has come to pass.

House Speaker John Boehner is throwing in the towel. At the end of October – after he has steered the U.S. House of Representatives away from the government shutdown cliff – Boehner is resigning not just the speakership but his seat in the House.

I am not upset because Boehner is resigning. I am upset because I actually will miss Boehner. A moment I long feared has come to pass. It’s the moment when I know for sure that I will remember John Boehner as a “moderate.”

When Boehner became speaker in January 2011, the Ohio Republican represented the end of Democratic control of the House. The GOP, fat with the midterm elections of 2010 and beholden to the Tea Party, was eager to make life hell for President Barack Obama.

Speaker John Boehner was going to be the leader of that movement.

It was not yet clear, when Boehner accepted the gavel from ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi, that the Tea Party was going to make Boehner’s life a bigger hell than it ever could for Obama.

But Boehner had come into the speakership with some of his conservative credentials already in question by the Tea Party. In the midst of the meltdown that started to smash the U.S. economy in 2008, Boehner voted for the bailouts, including the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

But I saw that support, as most people did, as a gut-check moment of ultimately patriotic bipartisanship. At the time, Adam Putnam – now Florida’s agriculture commissioner – was a Boehner lieutenant in the House. During a 2010 interview with The Palm Beach Post, where I was deputy editorial page editor, Putnam recalled that the GOP leadership supported TARP after sensing the intense fear of Bush administration officials who briefed them on the crisis.

“History will judge that it was an absolutely important factor in keeping the economy from going over the precipice,” Putnam said.

To this day, that admission by Putnam increases my respect for him.

But after Obama took office and the, “We’re all going to die!” flavor of the crisis abated, Boehner seemed to me to swing toward the Tea Party. They flirted with defaulting on the U.S. debt and shut down the government for 16 days in 2013.

But it gradually became evident that Boehner and Mitch McConnell – Republican leader in the Senate – were not willing to give in totally to the fire-breathers, particularly when it came to defaulting on the debt.

McConnell, having just become majority leader in the Senate, is not about to give up power. But Boehner clearly was tired of the crap. He didn’t want another government shutdown. He didn’t want to endure another debt-limit fight. He didn’t want to battle back against Tea Party attempts to oust him from the speakership for the “sin” of accepting Democratic votes to pass legislation disapproved of by the crazies in the Republican Party.

I can imagine Boehner looking at Donald Trump standing astride the polls and thinking to himself, “This isn’t my party anymore.”

This kind of thing has happened before. President Ronald Reagan’s willingness to work with Speaker Tip O’Neil on entitlement reform now seems quaint. President George H.W. Bush agreed to raise taxes, which helped to make him a one-term president. Bob Dole, former GOP leader in the Senate and the party’s 1996 presidential candidate, last year told The Washington Post, “I thought I was a conservative, but we’ve got some in Congress now who are so far right they’re about to fall out of the Capitol.”

I now wistfully look back on those guys, who I used to consider staunch conservatives, as credible moderates.

In Florida, we’ve seen some of the same thing, most explicitly in Charlie Crist’s shift from conservative Republican governor, to independent, to Democrat.

And here’s another horrifying thing: In this climate, even Jeb Bush feels like a moderate. My only consolation: Jeb probably hates that even more than I do.

Jac Wilder VerSteeg is a columnist for The South Florida Sun Sentinel, former deputy editorial page editor for The Palm Beach Post and former editor of Context Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.