It looks like the conventional wisdom was correct:
The House will vote as soon as Tuesday afternoon on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the fiscal year. The measure will not target President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, giving Democrats what they have long demanded and potentially enraging conservatives bent on fighting the president on immigration.
…The decision marks a big win for Democrats, who have long demanded that Congress pass a “clean” bill to fund DHS free of any immigration riders. For weeks, Boehner and his top deputies have refused to take up such a bill, as conservatives have demanded using the DHS debate to take on Obama’s directives, which include action to prevent the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.
I thought the most likely course was a brief DHS shutdown (a week or two) just to save face, followed by a pretty clean funding bill. But I was too pessimistic. Apparently the House leadership wasn’t willing to take the PR hit that would inevitably involve.
I wonder if Republicans could have gotten a better deal if the tea party faction had been less bullheaded? Last week’s debacle, where they torpedoed even a three-week funding extension, surely demonstrated to Boehner that he had no choice but to ignore the tea partiers entirely. They simply were never going to support anything except a full repeal of Obama’s immigration actions, and that was never a remotely realistic option. The subsequent one-week extension passed only thanks to Democratic votes, and that made it clear that working with Democrats was Boehner’s only real choice. And that in turn meant a clean funding bill.
But what if the tea partiers had signaled some willingness to compromise? Could they have passed a bill that repealed some small part of Obama’s program—and that could have passed the Senate? Maybe. Instead they got nothing. I guess maybe they’d rather stick to their guns than accomplish something small but useful. That sends a signal to their base, but unfortunately for them, it also sends a signal to Boehner. And increasingly, that signal is that he has no choice but to stop paying attention to their demands. There’s nothing in it for Boehner, is there?
