Now that's just sad.
House Speaker John Boehner blames President Barack Obama for Congress’s inability to pass an immigration reform bill, saying that it’s a lack of trust in the president that keeps members of the GOP from getting it done.
“The American people want us to deal with immigration reform,” Boehner said on Fox News’s “Kelly File” on Monday. “I’ve tried to get the House to move on this now for the last 15 or 16 months. But every time the president ignores the law, like the 38 times he has on Obamacare, our members look up and go, ‘Wait a minute: You can’t have immigration reform without strong border security and internal enforcement, how can we trust the president to actually obey the law and enforce the law that we would write?’”
Not sure where the
38 times number comes from—the Googles suggest it may be cribbed from a
Wall Street Journal editorial from last month, an an unattributed assertion of "regulatory delays" viciously regulated-at by regulators, since apparently any government functionary doing anything that John Boehner or the
Wall Street Journal spittle hydrant might disapprove of now counts as law-breakin' now—but the general premise that Boehner and the United States House of Representatives can't muster the will to fix national problems because his people just don't
like Obama? What a dull, uninspiring excuse.
Yes, I think we've already surmised that the new crop of batshit crazy Republican House members don't like Obama by the perpetual inability of said House to even keep the basic functions of government going, over the past five years, and the relentless primary attempts etc. inflicted on any Republican suspected of insufficient purity in the whole not-liking-Obama plank of the party platform. It has been a bit of a big deal.
So what we seem to have here is a House Speaker signaling that as far as he's concerned, the job of legislating important things is over until a new president comes into office. And since I don't see the Orange Avenger putting his nose to the grindstone to start cranking out new laws for a new Clinton or Biden or any other Democratic presidency, that probably means Congress will get back to work only when a new Republican president comes around. That'll probably be the exact day when Republican senators suddenly realize that the president has the duty to appoint federal judges and his own staff after all, and when Paul Ryan suddenly discovers that budget deficits are in fact doing God's own work, and when Obamacare once again is known as the Affordable Care Act, and Mitt Romney resurfaces to say "yep—I built that. That was me."
But they still won't tackle immigration reform. The same Republicans that don't trust Obama aren't about to trust, you know, immigrants. Though that's purely a coincidence, I am sure.