Former House Speaker John Boehner says he once tried to persuade the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to run for vice president on the 1996 GOP ticket with presidential nominee Bob Dole.
In an opinion piece posted Tuesday by the
Independent Journal Review, the former Ohio lawmaker says he thought Dole's campaign needed "some rocket fuel," and reasoned that Scalia was a "brilliant, engaging, conservative Italian-American justice with a large, Catholic family, with potential cross-generational appeal."
"Scalia agreed to meet me and Barry Jackson, my chief of staff, for a clandestine lunch discussion at one of Scalia's favorite establishments," Boehner writes.
"It was there that Jackson and I made our pitch, over a pepperoni and anchovies pizza."
Boehner said Scalia "understood what was at stake for the country, and felt compelled to listen, out of a sense of duty."
But two days later, Scalia called back to turn the offer down.
"John, you're not a lawyer, right? Well, write this down," Boehner quotes the jurist saying. "The possibility is too remote to comment upon, given my position," Scalia dictated, Boehner writes.
Ultimately, Dole would choose Jack Kemp to be his running mate, which Boehner says "accomplished the goal of bringing excitement to the ticket."
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