Boehner’s Crocodile Tears for Amnesty

...Speaker Boehner’s crocodile tears in his attacks and cries against the conservative movement are really about the next fight. Speaker Boehner intends to pursue immigration reform, with an amnesty component. Before he gets there, he needs to shape battle lines.

There are a number of fence sitters on the right. Speaker Boehner needs them on his team. By castigating the conservative movement now and making them the unpopular crowd, the Speaker and Republican leaders intend to draw the fence sitters to them. Once they have done so, they can move on to a primary season where they can fight against the unpopular crowd intent on driving some incumbents from office.

Then the real fight will begin — immigration reform. The Speaker assumes he can marginalize conservatives through primary season, make conservatives unpopular, then push through an amnesty based immigration reform plan daring his tenuous coalition to move over to the unpopular kids’ table.

....the Speaker is laying the ground work for his legacy — he will be the man who gets immigration reform through the House of Representatives. He is already staffing up on this front.

Rebecca Tallent is the Speaker’s new immigration policy director. Until last week, Ms. Tallent served as the director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Before that, she worked for Senator John McCain as his Chief of Staff. Ms. Tallent helped Senators McCain and Kennedy formulate their amnesty based immigration plan in 2007....

It would be very unusual for Speaker Boehner to bring on Ms. Tallent, given her background, unless he was ready to go forward with immigration reform.  Likewise, it would be unusual given her background for Ms. Tallent to go work for someone not interested in comprehensive immigration reform.

....Fence sitters in the Republican Party should be careful, lest they wind up working against their own goals in the next fight.