It’s all come down to this—immigration reform now rests firmly on the shoulders of one man: Mr. John Boehner. It is the defining moment of his speakership. The denouement. The final scene.
You’ll remember that during the president’s first term, and despite endless discussions and rounds of golf, Speaker Boehner couldn’t reach an agreement on a grand bargain. And so we had the debacle of the debt ceiling that undermined the recovery and tarnished the credit-worthiness of this great nation.
And we’ve had four years of this. You see, this isn’t about the president suggesting socialist policies, or channeling his father’s “Kenyan ghost,” or palling around with terrorists, or proposing death panels… All of that risible nonsense proposed by cretinous dunderheads who suffer with halitosis because they’re always speaking from an orifice that’s directly connected to their bowels.
Four years have been frittered away even as the country was on its knees and in desperate need of assistance. Four years of repetitive press conferences by House Republicans who couldn’t think of an original thing to say in a month of Sundays—all of it, a well-orchestrated sideshow that they put on center stage every month for four years.
But now, the very governance of this nation has come down to whether Speaker Boehner and the circus he leads has any interest in addressing a major issue that they can no longer ignore: It’s about the plight of 11 million people—a virtual nation-within-a-nation. It’s about the future of this nation, and the future for millions of families.
The test is whether the House Republicans are really in it for the country as opposed to being politicians for their own self-interest. Is this about service to the nation, that they love to talk about, or are they to be exposed as the deeply hypocritical individuals that politicians have become in the public consciousness?
As Speaker Boehner ponders what to do, he might reflect upon the words of Dr. Martin Luther King during an address at the National Cathedral in Washington back in 1968:
“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’But Conscience asks the question ‘Is it right?’And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but … he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”
Do the right thing, Mr. Speaker.
Martin Bashir