John Boehner wanted Antonin Scalia to run for vice president in 1996

John Boehner wanted Justice Scalia to run for VP in 1996.

(Image credit: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

published 16 February 2016

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia served from his appointment in 1986 until his death Saturday. But if former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had his way, Scalia would've stepped down from his post in the '90s.

As Boehner wrote Monday in the Independent Journal Review, he wanted Scalia to join Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign ticket as vice president, explaining that Dole needed a buzzy partner if he hoped to defeat Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton:

The solution, I believed, was right in front of us — or more accurately, across the street from my hideaway office in the Capitol, in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a brilliant, engaging, conservative Italian-American justice with a large, Catholic family, with potential cross-generational appeal and the ability to help reconstruct the broad coalition that had made Ronald Reagan president 16 years earlier. It was a pick nobody would have seen coming, and one with the potential to ignite the Dole campaign in a manner no one thought possible. [Independent Journal Review]

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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.