For months, John Boehner has been saying that Congress needs to work with the White House to reform immigration laws, but when asked why that isn’t happening, he suggests it’s mainly President Obama’s fault. For example, earlier this month, the House speaker told Fox News, “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?’” In his home district on Thursday, Boehner delivered his usual lament in a much different tone. As the Cincinnati Enquirer put it, he “theatrically mocked” his Republican colleagues for being too scared to tackle the issue.
While speaking to the Middletown Rotary Club at an Ohio country club, Boehner imitated his colleagues’ whining, saying, “Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard.” He continued, “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 … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”
Boehner noted that he’s been working for more than a year to get Republicans to take up the issue: “I’ve had every brick and bat and arrow shot at me over this issue just because I wanted to deal with it. I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” he said.
A full video of Boehner’s remarks has yet to surface, but local station WKRC aired the best part:
Boehner’s spokesman, Brendan Buck, downplayed the incident. “As the speaker often says to his colleagues, ‘You only tease the ones you love,’” he said. Still, we’re guessing this sums up how House Republicans are feeling right now:
Hopefully by the time he steps down as speaker, we’ll have an emotional Boehner outburst for every occasion.
