John Boehner Is Bug Eyed and Terrified as The Senate Unleashes His Worst Nightmare

Speaker John Boehner (r-OH) spends most of his time stuck between the tea party caucus and the political needs of his cabal, and then justifying the resulting dearth of legislation to the press by waving around a pamphlet ironically marked “jobs bill” in large print, which contains nothing related to actual jobs. But this week marks the beginning of Boehner’s worst nightmare, as the Senate advances immigration reform.

The Speaker must eventually be able to move some kind of immigration reform through the House if he is to do his job for the cabal; that is, if he is to do the bare minimum necessary to keep them from losing Hispanics for the next generation.
However, the tea party caucus is already freaking out about the alleged “amnesty” offered in any immigration reform bill that is remotely pragmatic. In other words, the tea party caucus of novices are not in the House to legislate; they are there to appease the base of wingnut extremists that put them there (aka, running for re-election instead of legislating). To this end, they are insisting on changes to immigration reform that render it unacceptable to Democrats.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi warned Boehner last week that given the civil war dividing the repugican cabal, he needed Democratic votes to move any legislation. She also informed Boehner that he wasn’t going to get Democratic votes by appeasing the crazy, fringe, parasitic extremists in his cabal.
Pelosi told Greg Sargent at the Washington Post that the recent farm bill debacle (aka, “amateur hour” as Pelosi called the debacle at Netroots Nation) in which House repugicans tried to go too far to the right and hence lost Democratic votes should be a warning to Boehner, “They were asking us to abandon our values, because they couldn’t get their act together. Hopefully they learned a lesson that you cannot go too far.”
John Boehner knows that if he wants to move any legislation forward in the House that can actually help elect repugicans in the future, he needs Democrats on board, because the tea party caucus will not budge.
Sargent further explained the position Boehner finds himself in:

Pelosi’s remarks are a reminder of the dilemma Boehner faces. There really may be nothing that a majority of repugicans could support that can also win over Democrats in any significant numbers. Anything that can pass the House with almost entirely repugican votes — whatever that would be — won’t get the support of Senate Democrats or President Obama. Which means, as Brian Beutler put it, that the only way Boehner can get reform through the House that has a chance of becoming law is if he accepts the need to “dispense with the member management theatrics and throw in with Democrats.”
Pelosi seems eager to use the farm bill debacle to sharpen the reality of the choice Boehner faces. “He’s going to have to work with us,” Pelosi says. “Hopefully they’ve learned something about legislating.”

The fact that John Boehner’s fumbling, petulant ineptitude is the best of the modern day repugican cabal speaks volumes about the electoral challenges facing the repugican cabal. It’s all downhill from Speaker Boehner, and he can’t even do the most basic job as Speaker without Nancy Pelosi doing all of the heavy lifting via the Democratic Party behind the scenes.
Without Pelosi quietly doing his job on the rare occasion that the House is actually allowed to vote on something that doesn’t offend most Americans, Boehner’s legislative record would be even more humiliating than it is now. Boehner can either “dispense with the member management theatrics and throw in with Democrats” or face certain legislative and repugican cabal electoral failure.
Instead of making a firm decision to either save his career or save his party, Boehner will spend the hours leading up to the inevitably ugly immigration face off in bug-eyed terror, barely suppressing frightened squeaks of EEP! even as he remains frozen in place, unable even to run from the looming shadow of inevitable demise.
Only the beltway media remains satiated by Boehner’s lurching pivots and red meat distractions. At some point soon, he will realize that even his well worn, sniveling, Obama-hate shuffle pivot won’t save him from the impending shadow of immigration reform doom. That might work on the media, but in spite of their best efforts, the media won’t manage to sell bigotry as a big tent idea for the repugican cabal.