Inauguration Day for Barack Obama in 2009 was clear, cold and crisp. More than a million people had come to Washington, and the Mall was alive with a sense of hope for the country’s future. I saw it from my seat on the west front of the Capitol. I felt the historic sense of the day and the optimism it promised as we in Congress went to work that January.

Shortly before that Inauguration Day, President-elect Obama came to the Capitol to meet with the Republican and Democratic leaders to discuss how we could work together to get the economy moving again. In that meeting, Mr. Obama asked John A. Boehner, then the House minority leader, and me to provide his team with our thoughts on how to put people back to work after the severe financial crisis of 2008. Given that my party had fought hard to elect someone else to the presidency, I was struck by this gesture and hopeful that it meant we could work together.

John and I established a working group on the recovery. We knew many of the traditional Republican policies had been consistently rejected by the Democrats, so we aimed to formulate policies that both sides could embrace.

The centerpiece of our plan was a 20 percent reduction in taxes for small businesses. We believed that small businesses were going to be the engine that powered America out of the economic downturn.