During his tenure as Speaker of the House, John Boehner would occasionally express some frustrations with his own GOP conference. A year before his 2015 retirement, for example, the Ohioan lamented the number of Republican "knuckleheads" he had to deal with.

Five months earlier, Boehner publicly mocked his own members over their reluctance to work on immigration reform. "Here's the attitude: 'Oh, don't make me do this. Oh, this is too hard,'" Boehner said, in a tone deriding House Republicans as if they were sniveling children. He added, "We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems, and it's remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don't want to."