"... sooner or later, the stalemate gets resolved in the same way: (Boehner) caves ..."

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Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell just set the stage for Boehner's inevitable cave on DHS
By Dara Lind, February 25, 2015

1.  According to the AP, Senate Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have agreed on a plan that would keep the Department of Homeland Security from shutting down Friday due to a lack of funding.

2.  The Senate plan involves taking up the DHS-funding bill passed by the House in January, but striking out the provisions that would require President Obama to stop his executive actions extending protection from deportation to millions of unauthorized immigrants — which had kept Senate Democrats from supporting the bill.

3.  Instead, the Senate will also vote on a separate bill that would block the president's executive actions, without tying it to DHS funding. (That bill probably wouldn't get past a Democratic filibuster, and would definitely be vetoed.)

4.  Speaker of the House John Boehner hasn't committed to bringing up a "clean" DHS funding bill that doesn't include the immigration provisions for a vote. In order to keep DHS from shutting down Friday, the House would have to take up — and vote on — that bill.

What happens next?

It's all up to the House of Representatives. More specifically, it's all up to Speaker Boehner: as long as he decides to bring the bill up for a vote and get enough Republicans to support it, it's guaranteed to pass.

As I wrote Monday, Boehner has been in this position many times before. "And every time, sooner or later, the stalemate gets resolved in the same way: (he) caves and introduces a bill that gets the support of Democrats and moderate or party-loyalist Republicans to pass the House."

Here's the rundown of how this has played out over the last few years:

*  Summer 2011: The debt ceiling fight.* This isn't exactly the same as the others: instead of Boehner initially refusing to compromise and then giving in, he worked out a compromise with President Obama that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for negotiated tax hikes and spending cuts, then was talked out of that compromise by then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. As a result, Congress ended up raising the debt ceiling by setting up the sequester (a set of mandatory spending cuts). But Eric Cantor isn't around anymore, and even if he were, intra-leadership conservative challenges to Boehner's authority weren't as strong after 2011. In recent months, in fact, Republican leadership has made it clear that their job is to enforce party loyalty from the top down.

*  January 2013: The fiscal cliff. At the end of December 2012, a whole stack of temporary policies (including the Bush tax cuts) were set to expire at the same time — which economists predicted would combine to shock the US into a recession. But as the expiration date loomed, Republicans refused to consider any plan that would continue any of these policies while increasing marginal tax rates by even a cent. Congress barely went over the fiscal cliff, but managed to stop itself on the way down. Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Vice President Joe Biden worked out a deal (including tax increases) that the Senate passed on New Year's morning 2013. Boehner, despite previous promises not to bring up any bill that violated the "Hastert rule" and didn't have the support of a majority of Republicans, brought the Senate deal up for a vote later that day, where it passed with the support of Democrats and a minority of Republicans.

*  January 2013: Hurricane Sandy relief. Right after the fiscal cliff showdown, Boehner was forced to break the Hastert Rule again — this time for a bill that would provide disaster-recovery funds to northeastern states hit by November 2012's Hurricane Sandy. At the end of the 110th Congress on January 1st (right after the fiscal-cliff deal), Boehner refused to bring up a Senate-passed relief bill because conservatives balked at more spending. But he was hammered by northeastern Republicans, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and within the week he'd agreed to bring up a bill in the new Congress. The series of caves on the Hastert rule in the first months of 2013 (at the end of November, he would break it again to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act) are what solidified Boehner's reputation in DC.

*  October 2013: Government shutdown. This is the worst-case scenario: the deadline for Congressional action came and went, and the federal government shut down for 16 days, before Speaker Boehner relented and allowed a bill to come to the floor that continued to fund the government without making changes to the Affordable Care Act and delaying its implementation for a year. But relent he did. The bill ultimately got about a third of House Republicans to join House Democrats in supporting it, practically sailing through the House.

*  January 2014: Another debt-ceiling increase. This one was relatively straightforward and drama-free. Republicans initially demanded that certain military pensions be restored as a condition of them raising the debt ceiling; Boehner and House leadership agreed to a "clean" raise instead.
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