Boehner’s willingness to talk tax rates raised eyebrows within his caucus. | AP Photo Boehner's 'grand bargain' - with GOP

Speaker John Boehner’s decision not to “go big” on a debt limit deal is the starkest demonstration yet of the limits of the Ohio Republican’s power.

The internal GOP backlash against his efforts to secure a package of $4 trillion in spending cuts and revenue-raisers revealed that Boehner sometimes is little more than the first among equals — capable of synthesizing Republican sentiments but unwilling to drive them.


Tax hikes, by any name, are a non-starter for a party that forged its brand on the mantra of lower taxes and less government, and Boehner’s willingness to talk rates with President Barack Obama — particularly in the context of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s refusal to do so — raised eyebrows within his conference. The uproar among Republicans, on and off Capitol Hill, forced Boehner to back away from the “grand bargain,” setting up a testy White House meeting where little was accomplished Sunday night.

“It’s crazy to think the speaker was considering a trillion [dollars] in tax increases. After all, we’re the anti-tax party,” said one veteran Republican lawmaker close to leadership. “Cantor brought him, the economy and our party back from the abyss. Cantor is strengthened, clearly. And it’s another example of the speaker almost slipping beyond the will of the GOP conference.”

Details of the potential “big deal” with President Barack Obama leaked before House members were briefed on the broad outlines of any agreement. “That was a huge problem,” acknowledged a top House Republican aide. “Boehner got way out in front of where he should have been. He pulled back because he had to do so.”

Boehner’s decision to tackle a “grand bargain” in the first place was a risky move. He had to contend with Republican presidential hopefuls drawing lines in the sand, a tea-party-inspired freshman class that has a mistrust of the political establishment and the lofty demands of the party’s base.

It’s tempting, and yet too facile, to view Boehner’s constraints only through the lens of his relationship with Cantor.

But it’s also impossible to assess Boehner’s place within GOP circles and in negotiations with Washington’s other political leaders without considering Cantor, who has a penchant for siding with the hard-liners when Boehner plays deal-maker, curtailing Boehner’s freedom of operation.

Cantor walked away from a round of debt limit talks led by Vice President Joe Biden when Democrats asked Republicans to identify taxes they would be willing to raise in exchange for spending cuts of as much as $2.4 trillion over 10 years. Then Boehner and his top aides worked with Obama and senior White House advisers to try to find a sweet spot. Cantor and his top aides then let it be known on Capitol Hill that he was not supporting the large-scale deal, terming it a tax hike — with the implication that Cantor was plainly not with Boehner.

On Friday afternoon, White House Legislative Affairs Director Rob Nabors, Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew, Boehner chief of staff Barry Jackson and Brett Loper, Boehner’s top policy aide, huddled in an office in the speaker’s Capitol suite.

On Saturday night, Boehner called it quits, citing Democratic insistence on raising taxes.

With that, Boehner was dragged squarely in line with Cantor — for now.

“They’re in the same place now,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said of Boehner and Cantor in a Sunday interview with POLITICO.

In a brief interview Sunday evening before he left the Capitol for the White House, Cantor downplayed any disagreement between himself and Boehner.

“I think we’re in exactly the same place. We are and we have been,” a casually dressed Cantor said. “He’s never said he’s for tax increases. And the White House just proved that in order to do what it was that we want to do to restructure the entitlement picture in terms of the fiscal soundness, they need tax rate increases and we’re not for that. So the speaker is exactly where I am: We need 218 votes to pass this thing, and I’m hopeful we can go to the White House right now and see if we can get there.”

But the distance between Cantor and Boehner — the former’s walkout and the latter’s flirtation with a tax-code deal — was not lost on their colleagues.

One House Republican described Cantor’s move as “too cute,” and another told POLITICO there’s “mixed opinion on Cantor.”

But Boehner has been given no room to make a deal.

“I don’t think Boehner had a choice, given the outcry against any tax increases in any form — from the presidential candidates to some of our more vocal freshmen,” the lawmaker said.

It’s an important moment for the relationship between the two leaders — a fascinating Washington dynamic.

They’ve long shared a frosty rapport, which extends to their top aides. And this episode serves to illustrate that Boehner has a No. 2 who is unafraid to go his own way on an extremely tricky issue. It wasn’t the first split in recent weeks. Boehner told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting last week that he was not going to provide details of the negotiations to the full conference. Cantor, for his part, wanted lawmakers to be kept apprised of the blow-by-blow of the discussions.

Complaints are surfacing about how backroom negotiations between Boehner and Obama played out. Republican insiders say Jackson has outsize influence in controlling the flow of information about the parameters of the deal, information that he wasn’t sharing with other leadership offices.

Boehner’s handling of his duties as speaker certainly diverge from recent precedent. Unlike his immediate predecessors — California Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert — Boehner does not rule the restive House Republican Conference; he merely presides over it. This is partly personal inclination, since Boehner doesn’t want to try to emulate Pelosi or Hastert’s top-down style, and partly political reality, because the GOP freshman class is too independent to be dictated to. Boehner has to constantly watch his flank, with Cantor and his 87 tea-party-inspired freshmen ready to pounce on any wavering from the conservative line. Boehner has a reliable partner in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but McConnell has his eye on a big personal prize — becoming majority leader — and will do nothing to jeopardize that goal.

Moreover, Boehner found that Obama can’t simply deliver the votes of House Democrats. Reports that the White House was willing to find savings in Social Security led to a left-wing revolt late last week. Several Democratic leaders, including Pelosi, said emphatically that they would not vote for any deal that cuts benefits for seniors.

The biggest question in Washington — and Wall Street — now is what happens next. House Republicans have said they’re uninterested in the spectacle of passing a debt ceiling increase through the lower chamber that has no chance of passing the Senate, but they may be forced into it at some point.

McConnell said on “Fox News Sunday” that there was a “contingency” plan, although he declined to detail it. House and Senate GOP aides said the goal “is to go to what came out of the Biden talks and gin that number [on spending cuts] as high as possible.” Republicans in the House insist that cuts alone from the Biden group would allow for a debt hike until the 2012 election.

The House is scheduled to vote on a balanced-budget amendment during the week of July 18, but that proposal is unlikely to gain the needed two-thirds majority. Many lawmakers oppose the requirement for a supermajority to approve any tax increase.

Aiming for the smaller budget deal is only the beginning of a number of difficult decisions Boehner will have to make during the next several weeks. Lawmakers will need several days to review any agreement with the White House — Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he would need seven days to vet an agreement. Outside conservative groups, who hold a good deal of sway with this class of Republicans, are pressing for similar time to look over the deal.