Tuesday’s congressional elections are certain to give Boehner a stronger hand. Boehner: No tax hike on top earners

COLUMBUS, Ohio — You want to know how unbending Speaker John Boehner is on tax increases?

He’s not willing to even consider hiking taxes on people making more than $1 million — something that’s been floated in the past as a possible compromise by members of both parties.


“We’re not raising taxes on small-business people,” Boehner told POLITICO during an interview in an Italian restaurant here. “Ernst and Young has made this clear: It’s going to cost our economy 700,000 jobs. Why in the world would we want to do that?”

Boehner’s strong comments on the eve of the election show just how tough a time President Barack Obama, if he is reelected, will have keeping his campaign promise to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $250,000 per year.

Tuesday’s congressional elections are certain to give Boehner a stronger hand — at least on Capitol Hill — as Republicans are expected to lose only a handful of seats and maintain an iron hold on the House majority. Boehner sees this election as a validation of his no-tax-hike approach — and doesn’t view an Obama victory as a mandate to raise taxes on upper-income Americans.

“Listen, our majority is going to get reelected,” Boehner told POLITICO. “We’ll have as much of a mandate as he will — if that happens — to not raise taxes. He knows what we can do and what we can’t do — I’ve been very upfront with him about it going back over the last year and a half.”

Raising taxes on incomes above $1 million has been seen by some as a potential compromise instead of raising taxes on incomes above $250,000, as Obama wants. Raising taxes only on millionaires strikes a populist sentiment and has recently even been received favorably by senior Republican aides, who have queried Democrats about their openness to it.

Of course, if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, the path is much different: Boehner will be Romney’s agent on Capitol Hill, helping the new president marshal his agenda through a Congress with which he’s unfamiliar. During his Monday interview with POLITICO in Ohio, Boehner said he was confident Romney can pull out a victory there — a feat that would ease his path to the White House.

But if Obama wins, Boehner and the rest of the House will be right back where they were during the past 16 months — negotiating with a president with whom he disagrees but now has spent months trying to defeat.

Obama has staked out a clear position: Taxes are going to go up on households that make more than $250,000. When asked if Obama should put out a plan to detail what he would do to avoid the fiscal cliff, Boehner said he doesn’t know.

“[Obama] continued to double down on this idea that if we don’t raise taxes that he won’t consider any bill,” Boehner said.

Boehner and the House Republican leadership’s immediate goal is a deal that extends tax rates into 2013 in order to set up time to negotiate comprehensive reform of the Tax Code.

It’s no stretch to say that the next six months will define John Boehner’s decades-long career in Washington. His desire to tackle the nation’s ballooning deficit has been well chronicled over the past few months, and it’s expected to start anew no matter who is elected to the White House.

Boehner, at 62, laughs off questions about his legacy — emotional he is, but reflective he’s not. Yet the battles of the past two years since he took the gavel have been brutal, and a few more years of fighting the same president over the same issues would be daunting for any speaker of the House.

“Have you ever seen me get concerned about that?” he said, when asked about his future. “It’s not something I worry about. You’ve heard me say it; I’ll say it again, same thing I tell my colleagues: If you do the right things for the right reasons, the right things will happen.”

Boehner has spent the past 45 days on the road, crossing the country in a jet, raising money for candidates — as he likes to say — from Maine to San Diego, North Dakota to Florida. His staff says he raised $93 million this cycle — more than $10 million of which went toward opening offices in states where Obama will win and Romney isn’t campaigning.

Now, for the past few days, he’s made more than a dozen stops across the Buckeye State in a green-wrapped “Team Boehner” bus, with a cadre of aides, including Barry Jackson, an Ohio native and Boehner’s former chief of staff. Most of the stops have been aimed at boosting Romney’s presidential prospects. Never were the trappings of his power more evident as Monday, as he dashed from Dover, Ohio – south of Akron – to here, Chillicothe and Cincinnati, in a massive motorcade that snarled traffic across the state.

He sat down with POLITICO for lunch at a Columbus restaurant owned by an old friend of Rep. Patrick Tiberi, an Ohio Republican whom Boehner refers to as his younger brother.

Boehner says he’s not at all surprised that the party has the prospect to pick up a seat or two in the House, or at least fight Democrats to a draw — something that was unthinkable just a year ago.

“All I’ve heard for a year is how we’re going to lose 5, 10, 15 seats,” Boehner said. “And I went to [Majority Leader] Eric [Cantor], [Whip] Kevin [McCarthy], [National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman] Pete Sessions and said ‘Guys, let’s not get into this nonsense that we’re going to have to lose seats.’ And we’ve really worked hard to maintain our numbers. I don’t know what the final number is going to look like, except that I know our team is doing good and I know that our team has done everything for our members and candidates that we can do for them.”

It’s obvious that Boehner is in an unusually good — and playful — mood on the trail these days. His House majority is in good shape, there’s no threat to his leadership, the bickering atop the party is largely paused and his party’s presidential candidate has a shot at winning.

Boehner was so relaxed that he bounded into the backstage area at Mitt Romney’s rally in his hometown of West Chester and playfully slapped and bear-hugged Ohio Gov. John Kasich — merrymaking that caught the attention of Boehner’s Capitol Police detail. He also playfully slapped this reporter’s face three times at a rally in the small town of Dover, Ohio.

“I feel good about where we are, but I never take any chances,” Boehner said a rally in Chillicothe, where he was joined by Ohio Republican Rep. Steve Stivers. “We’re in the last 24 hours of this, and why not give it a little bit more. That’s why I drank a Five Hour Energy on the way here.”

His ebullience is sure to recede in coming weeks, when he’ll be in frantic negotiations to deal with tax rates and the mess of other provisions that expire at year end. Boehner’s desire to get back to the negotiating table was neatly summed up at a rally in Chillicothe, where he likened his perseverance to his golf game.

“You know, one thing you’ll find out about me is that I never give up,” he said to the crowd. “You know, I play a little golf. I can hit it right, I can hit it left, I can miss the green, but I’m going to tell you what: I’m gonna find some way to get that ball in the hole before you do. You know why? Because I never give up.”