NBC’s Michael O’Brien: “Amid record-low productivity on Capitol Hill this year, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Sunday that Congress should be judged on how many laws it repeals, rather than how many new laws lawmakers enact. ‘We should not be judged on how many new laws we create,’ the nation's top elected Republican said on CBS. ‘We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.’”
The Hill: “Speaker John Boehner on Sunday declined to state whether he supports a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, saying that voicing his personal opinion would make it ‘harder for us to get a bill.’”
And, per Politico: “Speaker John Boehner is running for re-election. That is what he told a small group of close confidants Thursday night at Trattoria Alberto, his favorite Capitol Hill Italian restaurant, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.”
USA Today: “Last week's actions brought to 39 the number of times the House has voted to kill or delay the law. Sunday, Boehner promised more efforts to derail the Affordable Care Act. ‘This is not good for the country, and we are going to stay on it,’ he said.”
O’Brien: “Sen. John McCain, Ariz., a prominent Republican who's been known to break ranks with fellow members of the GOP at times, urged state legislatures to review Stand Your Ground laws in the wake of the Zimmerman trial, which became a national flashpoint for race relations in America. ‘I can also see that Stand Your Ground laws may be something that needs to be reviewed by the Florida legislature or any other legislature that has passed such legislation,’ McCain said on CNN.”
And this from Chris Frates: “John McCain and his fellow immigration gangsters called about 50 business lobbyists to the Capitol with a simple message: Pony up and fight. Delivering some of his famous ‘straight talk,’ McCain told them they weren’t spending enough money and were losing the battle for comprehensive immigration reform. What’s needed, McCain said, was a national, coordinated campaign to push the House to act on immigration reform. ‘This is a political campaign. We’ve gotta have communications. We gotta have coordination. We gotta have advertising. We gotta have a real political campaign with the goal of winning an agreement from the House to sit down and negotiate with us with a bill. That’s our goal,’ McCain told National Journal.
“But the marching orders managed to anger and alienate both the lobbyists in the room and House Republicans they are supposed to be targeting. Neither group wants senators telling them how to do their jobs. ‘Wow, these people are really trying to [screw] us,’ one House GOP aide said of the meeting.” And: “These people are wasting their money. They’re wasting their time, because the House is going to do what the House is going to do,” said a House GOP leadership aide.
NBC’s Carrie Dann: “With the rapid rise of Spanish-language media, politicians on both sides of the aisle – and on both sides of the comprehensive immigration reform debate – are increasingly reaching out to Latino voters in their native language as well as in English. For Republicans already grappling with internal divisions about how to address comprehensive immigration reform, that can occasionally mean another complicating factor: a small but vocal ‘English-only’ movement. And collisions between the two can often be fodder for headlines.”
Rep. Steve Cohen’s problems continue to unravel. He tweeted this: “Told AfricanAmerican towdriver my week -father -DNA test not father reporter/ attractive fallout.he(not aware of TN9)says,You’re BLack! Yo.”
He said on Morning Joe today, per Politico: “It was fun. It was funny. I had a tough night. Here’s what happened: I drive an ‘86 Caddy. A lot of African-Americans drive old cars — a stereotype — a lot of African-Americans drive old cars,” Cohen said, telling the story of his car breaking down and the tow truck driver responding. “I’m having no luck. He drives me, we ditch the car, I come back and I tell him the story. … He goes, ‘Man, you’re black.’ And I took it was a compliment. I hear it in Memphis all the time. My constituents don’t look at me as a white person, they say, ‘You’re one of us.’” Cohen continued that at home in Tennessee, for example at basketball games, “black guys that sell the cars come up and grab me by around the chest and pull me up and say, ‘You can’t have him, he’s ours.’”