John Boehner Tapped as Next Speaker of the House

House Republicans Wednesday selected Rep. John Boehner, the current House minority leader, to be the next speaker of the House. He will assume the job, and become second-in-line to the presidency, when the GOP takes control of the chamber in January and the full House casts its ballots for Speaker of the 112th Congress.

In addition to elevating him to the highest office in the House, the GOP rank and file also gave Boehner a cake for his 61st birthday, which fell on Wednesday.

"This is the dawn of a new majority, one humbler and more focused on the people's priorities," Boehner wrote on his Twitter feed after his election.

Earlier, current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won re-election to be the leader of her caucus.

In addition to making Boehner speaker, House Republicans also kept the rest of their leadership team in place after sweeping the November elections and picking up a whopping 61 seats to add to their new majority. Rep. Eric Cantor, (R-Va.), the minority whip, will become the new majority leader, while Rep. Kevin McCarthy, (R-Calif.), the deputy minority whip, will become the House majority whip.

Boehner is known on Capitol Hill to be a pragmatic, decisive leader, missing the ideology and rancor that seemed to define Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. But he's also sitting atop a newly emboldened GOP caucus with dozens of new members whose campaigns were fueled by an energized but unpredictable tea party movement that will demand that he and the House GOP hew closely to their small-government, low-taxes philosophy.

His moves since the midterm election have shown that he not only understands his new mandate but also learned from the mistakes of the GOP class of 1994, which rolled into Washington with outsiders' bona fides, but eventually devolved into internal power struggles and big-spending budgets.

Boehner told his members to be humble in victory and has laid out a budget-cutting agenda that pleased his base early on. Last week, he announced he would forgo the military jets provided to the House speaker and fly commercial on trips home to Ohio as he always has.

Beyond changing his travel arrangements, Boehner has tapped Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) to lead a group of GOP members to propose changes to House rules and procedures to make Congress more open and transparent. Finally, he said he wants to maintain the federal budget at 2008 levels, make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and freeze federal hiring.

Another task for Boehner in recent months has been to recast his image as a tanned, golf-loving country club Republican to a down-to-earth leader who understands Americans' struggles. He now frequently references growing up in Cincinnati, where his father owned a bar and young Boehner mopped floors and wiped tables after school. He has also revealed that of his 10 brothers and sisters, two brothers are currently unemployed.

Conservative critics of Boehner have said the speaker-designate is insufficiently conservative and worry that a man who has served in Congress for 20 years and in the Republican leadership for nine years cannot bring the change that's needed to Washington.

But before the midterm elections, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey defended Boehner as the right person to lead the House GOP now.

"I think he deserves his right to be tested on his own grounds and on his own terms and not be held accountable for the failings of the leadership team that went before him," Armey told Politics Daily. "He has proven himself to be a constitutional, small-government conservative with reliable initiative in the past. I think he'll be that in the future if given a chance."

Boehner was first elected to Congress in 1990 after running an Ohio business selling plastics. He quickly rose to prominence in Washington as a member of the "Gang of Seven," a group of Republican freshmen who spoke out against ethical abuses among Democratic and Republican House members, including hundreds who had bounced checks at the House bank and many more who engaged in an illegal stamps-for-cash exchange with the House Post Office.

He was awarded with a spot leading the Republican conference from 1995 to 1998, but was tossed out of his leadership position in 1998 as Republicans endured an internal power struggle and the GOP lost seats that year in the midterm elections. Boehner did not serve in the GOP leadership again until 2006, when he was elected minority leader, where he remained until Wednesday.