Exclusive: House Minority Leader John Boehner on the Health-Care Vote

EXCLUSIVE — Rep. John Boehner (R., Ohio), the House minority leader, tells National Review Online that as of late Thursday afternoon, Democratic leadership “still doesn’t have the votes” to pass their health-care bill, and that House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) is “prepared to sacrifice her
members, and her speakership, so that she can plant the flag of
universal health care in the ground.” Boehner says this weekend will be
a waiting game — “If the speaker doesn’t have 216 votes locked down,
she will not go to the floor. If she’s short, she knows that there is
no way she can pick up two or three votes on the floor.” On that same
point, he admits that “if this comes to the floor, it’s already
over…though I still don’t know how she can get there [to 216].…I’d
never put myself in this box.”

“The right is mad, the middle is mad, and the left is mad,” Boehner says.
“They’ve made a calculation: They know they won’t get the right or
middle, so they saying to their members that they need their left,
because if they lose the left, their base will sit home. The president
is staying in town because he knows the left will kill him if he’s not
here to help.”

Boehner adds that Pelosi has “made a big mistake by talking about this gimmicky
way to pass this without having a real vote.” President Obama, he says,
“has put all of his marbles, literally all of his marbles, on jamming
through something the people don’t want” and has “arrogantly misjudged
this entire issue from the start.” Here’s why, Boehner says: “The Left
sees this as their best opportunity in 50 years to put their stamp on
the direction of this country.”

Boehner believes that abortion will be the key complication for on-the-fence
Democrats in the final hours. “I’ve always thought that this would be
the issue,” he says. “This is public funding for abortion. They know it
can’t be fixed. There just aren’t the votes in the Senate.” He says he
respects pro-life congressman Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) for holding firm,
but cautions that he “never thought that Stupak could hold ten to
twelve votes.”

Boehner says there will be major political consequences for pro-life Democrats
who break from the Stupak bloc. “Take [Rep.] Steve Driehaus, for
example,” he says. “He may be a dead man. He can’t go home to the west
side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.”

If Boehner is “lucky enough to become speaker,” he says he plans to work
to repair the “damage to the institution” that the health-care debate
has caused over the past year. “It will be different,” he pledges.
“We’d run this different than how it is run today, and from how my
predecessors ran it. We’ve got to make this government smaller and less
costly. There are big problems to address. It’s been shocking how
people have been paying attention to the process, and we’ve noticed.
We’ll repeal this — we’ll put a bill on the floor to take out the
Medicare cuts, the tax increases, and the individual mandates.”

A final message for the weekend? “Kill the bill, just kill the bill,” he says. To do that, he says the NRCC is running a “Code Red” project, robocalls are going out, and members are going on local radio
shows and hosting telephone town halls — in Democratic districts. “It’s
all targeted,” he says.