Special: John Boehner's Legacy and the GOP Undercard Debate

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL: Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill. Welcome to the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

I’m joined around the table by Robert Costa of The Washington Post ; Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal ; John Harwood of CNBC; and Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times .

John Boehner ended 25 years representing Ohio in the U.S. House, five of them as speaker, this week. As expected, his farewell was tearful, but he also left behind a fractured House – surely nothing he intended when he first arrived in Washington. Doyle, what would you say his legacy is?

MR. MCMANUS: Wow. It’s not what he wanted it to be. I think John Boehner’s legacy inadvertently is the divided Republican caucus we now see in the House. He lost control of his own conference repeatedly. The most conservative members – the Freedom Caucus – are still quite restive under Paul Ryan, even though ideologically he’s closer to them. In a way, what happened to John Boehner, I think, is that he was – could have been a terrific speaker 20 years ago, but the party changed out from under him.

MS. IFILL: Do you agree with that?

MR. COSTA: I think the point about 20 years ago is an apt one because Boehner has always struggled to deal with the rise of multiple voices on the right, in the conservative news media, attacking not only daily but moment by moment, becoming really informed about the legislative process and making it difficult for him to get bills through. I also think Boehner’s legacy will be one that’s really emblematic of the Republican Party over the last 25 years – someone elected in 1990, was an ally to Gingrich in ’94, comes up, works with George W. Bush, moved a little bit to the center like many Republicans did, and then had to deal with this Tea Party wave and never was really able or capable to do so.

MS. IFILL: Well, he got – one of his last acts was getting this two-year budget deal passed. And if that were part of his legacy, Jeanne, let’s talk about that. What was in it that was Boehner-esque in particular? Or was it just the fact of the deal?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, it’s the fact of the deal. It’s a deal with the Obama White House that’s the light version of a package that they talked – began talking about years ago, and where they were going to do dramatic tax reform in addition to helping – changing the budget. So they couldn’t – they never got to the tax reform. That’s one of Paul Ryan’s top priorities.

But I would look at his legacy a little differently. I think he will – one thing that will be remarkable about him is that he managed to get through what he did get through, that we only had one brief partial government shutdown. With all of the budget – this is like his third or fourth time. Plus, they had to raise the debt ceiling two or three times, and this takes care of the latest one. It’s remarkable that he ever got all of those votes done with only one time when they stood up to him and shut the government down for a short period.

MS. IFILL: You know, I think of congressional leaders and what happens to them after they leave office. Many of them stay here. Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Trent Lott, they all basically remade themselves as lobbyists, essentially, in Washington. Dennis Hastert, we saw this week, did not, but it didn’t end well for him; he’s going to jail. But I want to talk to you, John, about this idea about what happens. What’s the second life for people who are leaders?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, you have a lot of options. First of all, he can hang his name on lobbying firms or law firms – I know he’s not a lawyer – and get a good salary for doing not very much. He can give speeches. He can get paid for speeches. He can write a book, get paid to write a book. And he can play a lot of golf, which is something he wants to do.

MS. IFILL: That’s what he – seems like he really wants to do, yeah.

MR. HARWOOD: He’s got the house in Florida. And so I think he – I think there are a lot of things he can do. I suspect he will – he will not lobby, but he will find a way to make enough money to enjoy life.

MS. IFILL: That sounds reasonable enough to me.

I want to talk to you guys – take you back to the debate. There was an undercard, remember? (Chuckles.) There are four other people, a much more manageable number, who actually went out on the stage and debated each other: Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum. Was there anybody who broke through in that undercard that we didn’t see that – like Carly Fiorina did in the first one?

MR. COSTA: I was on a Frontier flight with Senator Graham from Washington to Denver.

MS. IFILL: God bless you. God bless you, my son.

MR. COSTA: And he was alone in the security line. TSA Pre-Check was closed, and so he’s just a lonely senator going through security like everyone else. And he said to me, this is America. I’m a candidate for the highest office in the land that I’m just doing my best. And I think Graham, he’s having fun on the trail. He had fun at the debate. He’s also shown substance on foreign policy. If anyone breaks out of there and has a sliver of a chance in a place like South Carolina, it’s the home-state senator.

MS. IFILL: It’s fair to say that he’s having more fun than Jeb Bush, but go ahead.

MS. CUMMINGS: I would love to see Lindsey Graham get on the big stage just because he’s the only one who makes you laugh. (Laughter.) And he has a couple of standard lines that are really funny, and –

MS. IFILL: He also has a very clear foreign policy, which is not always the –

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, the foreign policy is just left me in, let me be your commander in chief so I can start bombing people. But –

MS. IFILL: Well – (laughs).

MS. CUMMINGS: But he also defended immigration reform, and this is always going to keep Senator Lindsey on the second stage.

MR. HARWOOD: I just don’t think it’s possible at this stage to do what Carly Fiorina did. I think the – there was an initial moment where – at that Fox debate where the two debates themselves were both looked at with a high level of seriousness. And I think her having elevated, Walker having left, we’ve now sort of moved past the point where somebody can get a lot of traction from that debate.

MS. IFILL: It’s more likely someone’s going to fall off the main stage.

MR. HARWOOD: That’s right. And the one thing, though, candidates are talking about having a meeting this weekend, and people like Lindsey Graham have been pushing for having debates randomized among the 14 so that you would get a chance, despite your poll numbers. I suspect the higher-rated candidates aren’t going to be too interested in that, but we’ll see what happens. It’s an unpredictable situation.

MR. MCMANUS: The other reason that they can’t move up is that there really isn’t a niche in that – on that big stage for anybody who’s down below. Maybe Lindsey Graham, if foreign policy suddenly became the big – you know, a big flashpoint, but –

MS. IFILL: Or a sense of humor.

MR. MCMANUS: Or a sense of – right, the humor deficit. But, you know, Carly Fiorina was a terrific debater and there was no woman on the stage. It did the rest of them good to have that. But the others don’t actually have a natural niche to – niche to move into.

The other thing to look forward to in the future, though – and this was supposed to happen on this last debate, I am told – is that the Republican Party and those candidates have to hit a crunch point at which they decide, are we going to continue having – how many people were on that stage?

MR. HARWOOD: Ten on the main stage, four on the first.

MR. MCMANUS: Yeah, 10. You know, is 10 still the right number? Is 3 percent the right cutoff? Should it be – or 3 percent, and if you’re at two-point-something –

MS. IFILL: If 3 percent were the cutoff in the polls, how many of those people would still be on the stage?

MR. HARWOOD: Eight of the 10 would have been there if you had to get an actual 3 percent as opposed to rounded up from 2.5 (percent) and above. Christie and Paul would not have made it.

MR. MCMANUS: Because the one thing we know is that a debate with three or four candidates is infinitely better and more substantive and meatier than any debate with 10 candidates.

MR. HARWOOD: No question.

MS. IFILL: That was actually true of the undercard. Even though very – dramatically fewer people watched it, it was actually more interesting in that way, in that respect.

MR. MCMANUS: That’s right.

MS. IFILL: Thank you, everybody. We’ll see you all the next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .