"... GOP lawmakers have thrown in their lot with an overwhelmingly white, aging constituency, beyond which they see no future." Keep it up, GOP!

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COMMENTS: 
*  The R's are an anachronism. Demographics are going to destroy them if they do not change with the times.  Good riddance.
*  "Reform" is the word politicians use when they don't want to enforce existing law.
*  If any of us were to neglect doing our jobs as much as what Mr. Boehner does his , we would have been canned within a matter of weeks of being hired. He hasn't the sense he was born with. If he weren't so afraid to confront the Tea Party, for the lackluster batch of uneducated fools they are, maybe this country could get something important and worthwhile done, such as a working immigration law that upholds and adds to the existing.
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Don't believe John Boehner — Republicans are to blame for failing to pass immigration reform
By Editorial Board, The Washington Post, July 11, 2015

The other day, House Speaker John A. Boehner found himself in Ireland, where somehow he left the mistaken impression that he intends to legislate a solution to the United States' broken-down immigration system.

Pressed by Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who complained that some 50,000 Irish citizens in the United States live in a state of limbo owing to their expired visas, Mr. Boehner (R-Ohio) mentioned for the umpteenth time the importance he attaches to immigration reform.

If only.

Within days, the speaker's office was forced to walk back his comments, lest Mr. Boehner raise expectations that the Republican-controlled House has the slightest intention of taking up a comprehensive immigration bill, or even writing one.

The GOP's inertia, said a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, is all the fault of President Obama, who simply can't be trusted to enforce any law Congress might pass.

That would be a more convincing excuse if Mr. Boehner himself believed it, which he clearly doesn't. Just 15 months ago — before Mr. Obama muddied the water by trying to change immigration law by executive action — the speaker forthrightly blamed his fellow GOP lawmakers for quailing at his entreaties that they take up an immigration bill.

"Here's the attitude," he said, scrunching his face like a squalling toddler to make plain his contempt for the Republican excuses. " 'Ohhhh, don't make me do this. Ohhhh, this is too hard.'"

No doubt, Mr. Boehner's caucus didn't much appreciate being blamed by the speaker for its inaction.

So before long, he duly reverted to the pretext favored by Republicans — that they cannot pass laws because the president can't be trusted to enforce them.

In fact, for a year Mr. Boehner sat on an immigration bill that Mr. Obama would have been pleased to enforce — the one passed by the Senate, with bipartisan support, in 2013.

That bill, or one like it, could have passed the House and been enacted had the speaker allowed it to reach the lower chamber's floor for a vote.

It included tougher enforcement and a path to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants. Mr. Boehner coaxed and cajoled and worked his wiles, but in the face of opposition from conservative Republicans, he never permitted a vote.

It was the GOP's recalcitrance that finally prompted Mr. Obama to issue his executive order in November, shielding several million illegal immigrants from deportation.

Although that order has been blocked in the courts, where it is all but certain to be tied up for many more months, Republicans seized on it as an excuse for continued paralysis — the very same paralysis that has beset them for almost a decade on the immigration issue.

The truth is, it is political demographics, not the president's trustworthiness that has frozen the Republicans.

In thrall to part of their base, GOP lawmakers have thrown in their lot with an overwhelmingly white, aging constituency, beyond which they see no future. The United States, ever more diverse, is changing fast; House Republicans, fearful of that change, prefer scapegoats to solutions.
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