John Boehner

John Boehner was Speaker of the House of Representatives for five years and resigned because he could not govern his own party. He was one of twelve children of an Ohio bar owner, worked his way through night school and ran a plastics and packaging business before entering the House in 1990. He arrived as a reformer - one of the Gang of Seven who exposed the House banking scandal - and rose into leadership under Gingrich, lost the conference chairmanship after the 1998 elections, and rebuilt through the education committee, where he wrote No Child Left Behind with Ted Kennedy. He became Speaker in 2011 after the Tea Party wave, and spent the next five years discovering that the members it had sent him did not regard a majority as something to be used. The debt-ceiling standoff of 2011 cost the United States its AAA rating; the grand bargain he negotiated privately with Obama on taxes and entitlements collapsed when he could not deliver his own conference; the 2013 shutdown over the Affordable Care Act ran sixteen days and achieved nothing. He passed the measures that mattered repeatedly with Democratic votes, which the hardliners treated as betrayal. Facing a motion to vacate the chair in the autumn of 2015, he announced his resignation the day after hosting Pope Francis at the Capitol, an audience he had sought for twenty years, and said he felt nothing but relief. He was succeeded by Paul Ryan, who lasted three years and left for the same reasons. He was known for weeping in public, for a permanent tan, and for smoking through two decades in which that had become unusual in Washington. After leaving Congress he joined the board of a cannabis company, having opposed legalisation while in office, and said his thinking had changed.

• Lived: 1949 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: politician