Excuses, Escuses

Boehner has an excuse for why he and his caucus are dragging their feet on immigration reform:

House Speaker John Boehner blames President Barack Obama for Congress’s inability to pass an immigration reform bill, saying that it’s a lack of trust in the president that keeps members of the GOP from getting it done.

 

“The American people want us to deal with immigration reform,” Boehner said on Fox News’s “Kelly File” on Monday. “I’ve tried to get the House to move on this now for the last 15 or 16 months. But 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?’

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/john-boehner-obama-immigration-105467.html

"Gee...we'd like to do our job, but the president is so untrustworthy that we can't seem to give enough of a damn to do it".

This has to be one of the laziest excuses for slacking off that I've ever seen.

Let's leave aside the fact that the president has not "ignored the law" when it comes to Obamacare. The ACA is settled law. I'm sure Boehner doesn't forget the Supreme Court ruling from last year or the year before that ruled the individual mandate Constitutional?

I also hasten to point out the fact that Obama has been far more severe with deportations than even his predecessor - a fact that has caused the president to receive criticism from those on his side of the aisle.

Whether or not Obama is trustworthy or has followed the law, however, is beside the point. House Republicans bear the onus of passing a comprehensive immigration bill, and whether they end up doing so or not has absolutely nothing to do with Obama whatsoever. Republican failure to reform our immigration laws will be a failure on the Republicans' part - not Obama's.

This is a pattern for Congressional Republicans: a litany of excuses for why they can't or won't do their job, and little if any actual work. If I, as a current college student, did that, I'd have failed out of my classes several semesters ago.

It's time for Republicans to dispense with the excuse-making and start with doing their job.