Once again, Boehner's failed leadership style has caused him to kowtow to Tea Party extremists in the House. As the parsed-down, doomed-to-fail-anyway immigration bill he had intended to pass went down in flames, sabotaged by his own party, Boehner continued his Orwellian press conferences, wherein he simply announces a change of course without acknowledging that the tail is wagging the dog. Boehner, here's a way out.
Speaker of the House John Boehner has today, yet again, kowtowed to the extremist Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.
Today the House had scheduled a vote on a bill to approve an extremely parsed down immigration bill that would spend $690 million on immigrant enforcement measures along the U.S-Mexico border. President Obama had requested $2.7 billion. At the moment that the House was to schedule a vote on the parsed down bill, Republican Tea Party caucus members booed the House Majority Leader on the House floor. Shortly after this, the bill was pulled from the floor.
What was the major concern? The bill contained a provision that would allow illegal immigrants who had lived nearly their entire lives here to stay indefinitely. The Tea Party caucus once again raises its ugly, exclusive, nativist head to rail against a minority that cannot yet stand up for itself. With a drunk Boehner at the wheel, the Tea Party caucus keeps reaching over from the passenger seat to try and drive the car off the cliff.
Boehner, by all accounts, has craved the Speaker of the House position for much of his career. He is currently set upon a legacy of gridlock, stalemate, a government shutdown, and anti-brown-people politics, all thanks to a vocal minority of his party.
The Tea Party's real strength in the House is that they are in the majority party, yet control 66 votes - more than enough for the numerical difference needed to defeat the passage of a bill assuming the Democrats also vote against it. But that's the trick - only so long as the Democrats vote against it.
Boehner's path forward is start governing and let the Tea Party do whatever they are going to do. Every House Speaker since Denny Hastert has followed the Hastert Rule (a fellow Illinoisan, by the way, who knew when to quit). The Hastert Rule states that a bill will only be brought to the floor for a vote if "a majority of the majority" would vote to pass it. This has been the rule for Republican Speakers of the House since the 1990s.
Boehner has extended the rule -- now he must have a majority of the majority as well as insurance that the bill will be guaranteed to pass.
Boehner -- Democrats will work with you. End the Hastert Rule and be the Speaker with a legacy that you will be proud of. If you keep beating up women, brown people, starving immigrant kids, the only people left willing to vote Republican are going to be rich, white, old, white men, there just aren't enough of you guys left to win an election.