John Boehner says he really wants to get an immigration bill passed out of the House, but that's a pretty vague thing to say unless he says what kind of an immigration bill he wants to see get passed. And, as you might guess, he's not saying what it is that he wants. And he's
defending his silence as political strategy:
”It's not about me. It's not about what I want,” he said on CBS on Sunday. “What I've committed to, when I became speaker was to a more open and fair process. And as difficult as this issue is, me taking a hard position for or against some of these issues will make it harder for us to get a bill... If I come out and say I'm for this and I'm for that, all I'm doing is making my job harder.”
So he wants to get a bill, but he doesn't want to say what getting a bill means because taking a position would just be making his job harder. Interpreting that vast expanse of nothingness basically is the same thing as taking a Rorschach test, but at the very least it demonstrates the extent to which he doubts his own ability to exercise power and lives in utter fear of the chamber he's supposed to lead.
And no matter which side you think Boehner is pulling for—the anti-immigrant House minority dominating the GOP or the majority of House members who support granting legal status and creating a path to citizenship to immigrants while reforming the process for future immigration—I think this is a fair question to ask: Given that Boehner says his job as Speaker is to be nothing more than a process-oriented paper pusher, steadfast in his commitment to saying nothing one way or the other, why in the world is he bothering to go on Sunday talk shows? Aren't talk shows what you do when you've got something to say? Boehner's message seems to be that he doesn't have a message.