republicans. joining us now from atlanta. patricia murphy. i know you talked to one of the tea party groups taking on boehner. the first question is how big of a threat are they to him? i would say listen. for him to get reelected to congress, they are no threat at all. for him to be reelected speaker, when you start to look at the fact that john boehner almost didn t make it through almost a first ballot process, he made it by about six votes. no opposition and no specific opposition. he did have conservative opposition in 2012. they could start to chip away and look at the republicans who announced their retirement, a number of those are john boehner loyalists and allies and they voted for him and pushed him for speaker. when these groups who have been against boehner all along and they start to base their support on a person s candidacy based on
so it s interesting to see him flip on the immigration issue. what s interesting, though, this morning it seemed like senator schumer kind of called the bluff, right, because the argument is, well, we don t trust president obama to enforce the law, which is a ridiculous argument given everything he s done. then you had schumer saying, okay, we ll sign the legislation and we ll just make it go into effect in 2017. i mean, that essentially is calling their bluff. exactly. they want to be the architects of immigration reform. it s plain and simple. and i ve said this before. democrats need to be nervous because if republicans keep stalling, latinos are going to eventually punish democrats. they re not going to cross party lines and vote for republicans, but they re going to do what they did in 2010, which is stay home. so the president and legislative leaders really need to push on boehner. something has to be done. i want to switch gears, jared, for just a moment because eric holde
poverty issue but really to unemployment insurance benefits. give us some idea of what democrats can do realistically to try to get that issue through. because it s going to be very difficult, as you can imagine, to get it through the house of representatives. well, i think they can get it through the senate. i think they will get it through the senate. i think then there has to be a lot of pressure on boehner. there s some polling data out today that suggests that even in his own district, people are overwhelmingly in favor of extending unemployment benefits. but he s dealing with a caucus that does believe in this kind of social darwinism, this reactionary view of the world. you know, when i was listening a few minutes ago, i had the image in my head of the children of middle class and wealthy people walking by the children of poor people who were sweeping up the lunchroom before they can get something to eat. now, somehow or other, we have to get past that in this society. we have
single thing on their list of things that are still outstanding, it would still be you still wouldn t be able to turn around these horrible numbers. so it s not just how inefficient they are, it s also the things that they actually want to do are unpopular. let s look at what the speaker had. this is his big excuse. it s in the washington post today. blaming everything on something. he blamed on the low level accomplishment under his leadership. here s how he explained it away. listen, we have a very divided country and we have a very divided government. i m not going to sit here and underestimate the difficulty in finding the common ground. because there s not as much common ground here as there used to be. common ground hasn t always been on boehner s mind. listen to what boehner said in july when he viewed the lack of productivity as a badge of honor.
this is his big excuse. it s in the washington post today. blaming everything on something. he blamed on the low level accomplishment under his leadership. here s how he explained it away. listen, we have a very divided country and we have a very divided government. i m not going to sit here and underestimate the difficulty in finding the common ground. because there s not as much common ground here as there used to be. common ground hasn t always been on boehner s mind. listen to what boehner said in july when he viewed the lack of productivity as a badge of honor. any way you cut it and whoever s fault it is, you have presided over what is perhaps the least productive and certainly one of the least popular congresses in history. how do you feel about that? well, bob, we should not be judged on how many new laws we