“Listen, I told my colleagues in July I didn’t think shutting down the government over Obamacare would work because the president said I’m not going to negotiate,” Boehner said. “And so I told them in August, ‘probably not a good idea.’ Told them in early September. But when you have my job, there’s something you have to learn. When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk. So I said, do you want to fight this fight? I’ll go fight the fight with you.”

“But it was a very predictable disaster,” he continued. “And so the sooner we got it over with the better. But remember the issue. The issue was we wanted to delay Obamacare for a year because it wasn’t ready. Then we asked them to at least delay the individual mandate for a year. So we were fighting for the right things, I just thought tactically it was not the right way to do it.”