Ask Boehner when his last win was and he doesn’t have an answer. | JAY WESTCOTT/POLITICO Boehner's losing streak

Speaker John Boehner’s got quite the losing streak going.

Just in the past two weeks, nearly 100 Republicans said they’d vote against two different versions of Boehner’s signature highway bill — one that covers five years and another that was merely 18 months.


On Thursday, Boehner was forced to admit that the “current plan” is to bring up the Senate bill or “something like it.” Meaning he will be hard up to find enough members to support his vision for more road building coupled with expanded oil drilling.

And that loss is just this week alone.

( Also on POLITICO: Members of Congress: This job sucks)

House Republicans have twice handed President Barack Obama victory by passing his payroll tax holiday, which the GOP alternated between opposing and supporting. The second time the House took up the bill, Boehner and other Republican leaders caved to Democratic demands and didn’t pay for it, undermining their months-long argument that Democrats were hurting the Social Security program.

Then there was the supercommittee debacle last fall. Boehner opposed the creation of the elite bicameral panel in discussions with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), but it was created anyway and ended up failing. As a result, there will be deep cuts to entitlement programs — something that was supposed to punish Democrats, who now seem to welcome those trims. Hundreds of billions are now being cut from military spending, which is chafing hawkish House Republicans.

Now, the GOP’s five-year highway bill has been reworked, rethought and pulled off the floor so many times that Republicans have lost track which bill leadership is whipping.

If the five-year bill isn’t salvaged, the House will most likely be forced to take up a short-term deal that they’ve all said is harmful to business certainty.

The big Republican success of recent months — the Jobs Act — devolved into a skirmish over who deserves the credit for what bill on the heels of accusations that leadership snatched Rep. David Schweikert’s (R-Ariz.) bill to give it to his primary opponent, Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.). A version of the bill did pass on Thursday, but the effort was generally led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Ask Boehner when his last win was and he doesn’t have an answer.

“This is a very difficult process that we’re in,” Boehner said, told POLITICO on Thursday. “We’ve got a new majority, we’ve got 89 freshmen. And, you know, my job every day is to work with my members to find out where the center of gravity is and try to move legislation that’s in the best interest of our country. And we’re going to continue to do that.”

No one doubts that running the House Republican Conference is a tough job — this GOP majority has diversity of geography, opinion, legislative experience, ideology and temperament. And a Boehner spokesman insists that Republicans are notching victories on bills that get stalled elsewhere.

“Our legislative victories are the nearly 30 jobs bills that we passed, many with bipartisan support, and are now awaiting action in the Senate,” spokesman Michael Steel said. “We’re the vanguard, the beachhead of the American people in a Democrat-controlled town.”

Boehner’s staff also points to votes on the Keystone pipeline, FAA labor reforms and trade deals as major acheivements.

But the streak of recent wins for Democrats is quite jarring for some Republicans. It’s gotten so bad for Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) that he has stopped going to House GOP conference meetings. There’s simply nothing leadership can do to get him to vote for the issue du jour — the $260 billion highway bill.

“It’s a numbers thing,” Gowdy said in an interview Thursday. “I don’t criticize Boehner for it. He can move to the right and try to pass it out of the House, or you can move to the center and try to pass it overall.”

Gowdy has no interest in joining the House GOP leadership, which he deemed a club he wouldn’t join even “if you quintupled the salary.”

“Could you imagine trying to cobble together 218 votes in a conference full of high school student body presidents?” Gowdy mused.

Of course, if you talk to Boehner allies and aides, they say the speaker loves this kind of controlled chaos. The losses, they say, are an exaggeration of the Beltway media. They also point to billions of dollars in spending cuts and the fact that Boehner, Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have “changed the conversation in Washington” — now, debt ceiling hikes have to be offset, spending is being cut and other federal programs made more efficient.

They also repeat the mantra that the 2012 elections will be “a referendum on Barack Obama and his failed policies,” and they can “only do so much with control of one-third of one branch of government.”

Still, in eight months, voters will head to the ballot box and Republicans will want to show they’ve been productive.

The highway bill won’t be that “W,” Republicans say. The short-term approach that House Republicans will be forced to take is a “continuation of policies in Washington that are not good for the country,” said New York Republican Rep. Thomas Reed. If the GOP passes it, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) said that “contractors say we’re not going to invest.” Shuster knows — he helped write the bill and his father, Bill Shuster, was the godfather of infrastructure spending.

Most members decline to talk about the string of misfortunes for Republicans, but they’ll gladly criticize their leadership’s work product.

“The inside baseball games is not my thing,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who heads the Republican Study Committee. “I look at it from this perspective — we have a debt bigger than our economy. We have to do dramatic things.”

Needless to say, he doesn’t think what leadership is doing fits that description.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen now,” he said. “I know there’s a lot of members who don’t like the legislation. You’ve got Steve LaTourette who isn’t going to vote for it and Jordan. It has to move one way or the other.”

Boehner is not one, at least these days, to postulate on his internal political position. Aides in leadership and the rank and file recount stories of him taking deep drags from his cigarette when things go wrong, and vowing he’ll get it right the next time.

But for some, there are too many “next times.” Members gripe over what they consider subpar results to the fights that mar D.C.

“Cantor isn’t Tom DeLay, Kevin [McCarthy] is not Roy Blunt,” said Georgia Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey, sipping a Coca-Cola on Thursday off the House floor. “Their style is a little different. It may be at some point, that they’re going to get tougher and meaner.”

Gingrey said Republicans have “good leadership” but that “maybe” leadership should toughen up. He respects Boehner, but “maybe he is a bit too nice at times.”

Some Republicans are nostalgic for a different era of GOP politics, when leaders could whip more than 100 members to ditch their ideology and notch a win.

“Well, it was a different whip and a different Congress,” said Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.), who recalled the heady days of Dennis Hastert and DeLay getting Republicans to support the Medicare prescription drug program. “And you have all the freshmen and everything. It depends how much the leadership wants it. They’ve got ways they can put pressure on almost everybody.”