Speaker of the House John Boehner mocked his fellow GOP House colleagues at a speech yesterday for not passing immigration reform:

Here's the attitude. Ohhhh. Don't make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard," Boehner whined before a luncheon crowd at Brown's Run County Club in Madison Township.

"We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it's remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don't want to ... They'll take the path of least resistance."

Boehner said he's been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform.

"I've had every brick and bat and arrow shot at me over this issue just because I wanted to deal with it. I didn't say it was going to be easy," he said.

Perhaps Boehner should listen to the 22 Republican Senators who sent a letter to President Obama urging him not to proceed with a plan to slow deportation of illegal immigrants.

“According to reports, the changes under consideration would represent a near complete abandonment of basic immigration enforcement and discard the rule of law and the notion that the United States has enforceable borders,” the letter said. “Clearly, the urgent task facing your administration is to improve immigration enforcement, not to look for new ways to weaken it.”

The review comes after the administration has come under intense pressure by advocates of an immigration overhaul to take further steps to reduce the number of deportations. Deportations have reached record levels under Obama, causing some of his allies to label him “Deporter-In-Chief.”

But many Republicans have ripped the president for taking matters into his own hands already, including in 2012, when the administration issued a policy granting deportation relief and work permits to children brought here illegally, provided they met certain criteria.

“The evidence proves that the Administration has collapsed immigration enforcement,” said Sen. Jeff Session of Alabama, the lead author of the letter and leading critic of the president’s immigration proposals. “As a result, millions of struggling Americans have been deprived of their jobs and incomes. Congress must work to end the lawlessness and restore constitutional order. Yet Congressional Democrats continue to empower the illegality and stonewall all efforts to stop it.”

The letter argues that Obama’s policies have already allowed people with criminal backgrounds to remain in the country. “Since [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] frequently takes no action until after the most serious crimes have occurred and the offenders have been tried and imprisoned, the administration is allowing preventable crimes harming innocent people to take place every day.”

The letter further argues that policy ignores the law, which “exceed the bounds of the Executive Branch’s prosecutorial discretion. It is not the province of the Executive to nullify the laws that the people of the United States, through their elected representatives, have chosen to enact. …”

Why should the House "reform" laws that the administration isn't following anyway?

Any enforcement provisions, any border security measures contained in an immigration reform bill are worthless. They are there for show. This administration has demonstrated time and time again that they are not serious about enforcing immigration laws already on the books.

At the very least, the president has to demonstrate that his administration takes the law seriously before any consideration is given to immigration reform. Boehner says that congressmen are there to get things done. But what can possibly be accomplished if any immigration reform is selectively implemented by a lawless administration that thumbs its nose at border security and fails to deport those who have already been legally determined to be in the country illegally?

There will probably be a series of votes sometime this summer on various immigration reforms. Boehner is hoping that a conference committee will tie them all together - along with a large chunk from the Senate bill - and send it back to the House for passage. It may work. The pressure is building on GOP fence sitters and it is possible the president will get his immigration reform bill by Labor Day.