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I don’t want to beat up on him (much) because McConnell’s the one who blew the GOP’s leverage by splitting DHS funding from amnesty repeal. Essentially, McConnell sided with Reid in telling Boehner that if DHS shuts down, it’ll be House Republicans’ fault. Boehner’s playing a bad hand dealt to him by his supposed ally in the Senate.But even so, how is his play here a winning one? What does a three-week reprieve achieve? It’s the worst of both worlds. Not only do Democrats get a clean funding bill for Homeland Security short-term with Obama’s amnesty still fully intact, they get to humiliate Boehner and McConnell all over again next month when GOP leaders inevitably still can’t figure a way out of this mess. The House will vote Friday on a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks in an attempt to avert a shutdown slated for Saturday at the massive agency… Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced the new strategy to his rank-and-file members during a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday night. Senior Republicans predicted it would win enough support to clear the lower chamber. “I think we’ve got plentiful support. I was very pleased with the response. I think it’ll be a very strong vote,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) told reporters after the meeting… House Democrats said they are whipping against the measure, which could make it difficult for Republicans to win the 218 votes necessary for passage given grumbling from some on the right that the measure would do nothing to attack President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.Sounds like Boehner’s going to have to do this with Republican votes, which means he can only afford to lose 27 conservatives. My gut says he’ll lose more than that, just because this humiliating fiasco won’t be complete without an embarrassing floor-vote failure for the GOP at the last minute. But maybe I’m wrong: House conservatives also understand that McConnell, not Boehner, is chiefly to blame for their loss of leverage. Maybe they’ll cut Boehner a break temporarily and vote for a three-week punt, knowing that if he tries to pass a clean long-term bill for DHS next month with no immigration concessions, they can always vote no then and kill that bill.So what’s the plan for next month? The first option is to get the Senate to go to a conference committee to reconcile the House GOP’s anti-amnesty DHS bill with a clean Senate funding bill. But that option’s dead on arrival: Harry Reid, the de facto leader of the Senate even now, says Democrats won’t provide the votes needed to get to 60 and trigger the conference. The second option is to cross their fingers and hope that the Fifth Circuit upholds the injunction against Obama’s amnesty issued by a federal judge in Texas a few weeks ago. If that happens, the GOP
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Topic: Punt: Boehner to offer “clean” three-week funding bill for DHS to buy time on amnesty strategy (Read 405 times)
