As I write this, the House has still not managed to pass a bill to deal with the border crisis. They've been trying for a few days now, but have been locked in a serious battle between Tea Party hardliners and Republicans from more moderate districts. The Tea Partiers are demanding the harshest possible bill, and the moderates are the ones who actually demanded that Speaker John Boehner attempt to do his job and get a bill through before they all fly home for a lavish five-week vacation. Moderate Republicans know that "we couldn't pass anything" is going to be a tough sell back home. When Boehner tries to make the bill extreme enough to appease the Tea Party hardliners, he loses moderate votes. When he tries to make it appealing enough to the moderates to vote for it, he loses Tea Party votes. Stay tuned, as the last act in this Keystone Kops drama has yet to take place!

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Speaker of the House John Boehner just gets weaker by the day, it seems. Today, he had to pull a bill from consideration because he did not have enough votes to pass it. The reason he didn't have enough votes to pass it is because he cannot do anything without the approval of a small faction of extremists within his own ranks. The Tea Party tail just wagged the Boehner dog, once again. Boehner, unsurprisingly, is attempting to blame it all on President Barack Obama. It beats the alternative of admitting his own weakness and incompetence, I guess.

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This is a rare week indeed in Washington, since it is one of those weeks when Congress actually attempts to get something done. There's a reason for this, of course, and it is the usual one: they're about to take another jaw-droppingly extensive vacation. They scurry about, in the days leading up to playtime, in an attempt to con the American people into thinking they can still get something done. It is, in fact, just about the only time any bills actually move forward -- when the threat of possibly having to cut their vacation short by a few days inspires them to action.

Think I'm being too harsh? Consider their big accomplishment so far this week: moving forward on a bill to fix the problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A bill finally made it out of the House and is expected to pass the Senate -- right before they all disappear for an astonishing five weeks. Some might react to this news with praise that Congress actually moved to solve a problem. I'm not that impressed, personally.

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John Boehner is currently involved in playing what can only be called a "game of chicken" with his own party. To rev this metaphor up to the redline (warning: this entire column is really nothing more than an extended metaphor), Boehner is driving the Republican Party towards a head-on collision with the Tea Party, way out on the edge of town, down Impeachment Road. As is usual in these bouts of self-destructiveness, Boehner has already taken his go-to explanation out of his pocket, and tried to blame President Obama for the fine mess Boehner is creating for himself. In other words, welcome to the opening of "Silly Season, 2014."

Some history is appropriate, to explore the "chicken" metaphor (and also because I can't resist citing an excellent film). The original game of chicken was portrayed in the film Rebel Without A Cause, and was actually called a "Chickie Run" (rather than the now-accepted "game of chicken" phrasing). This "game" was a deadly test of nerves, between two testosterone-filled young men who were long on machismo and short on brains. Two cars, driven by our two antagonists, race towards the top of a cliff edge. Speeding ever-closer to a suicidal plunge into the abyss, the game was lost by whoever bailed out first (by jumping out of their car to avoid personally going over the edge). The guy who stayed in longest was deemed the braver, and the guy who "chickened out" first was deemed the coward.

Since not every town has a handy cliff nearby, there is a second (and more well-known) version of the game's rules. Instead of two cars moving in parallel towards the edge of a cliff, what takes place instead is an even-more-suicidal contest of wills: both cars start far apart on a lonely road, and then race head-on towards each other. Whoever turns the wheel away from the imminent collision is the "chicken," in this construction. Once again, it should be noted ("Don't try this at home, kids!") that an overabundance of testosterone and a severe lack of common sense are both required to play such an idiotic "game."

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Has marijuana legalization reached the tipping point, where positive change is now all but inevitable? That question might have been seen as wildly optimistic even just last week, but over the weekend the respected New York Times editorial board fully endorsed legalizing recreational marijuana at the federal level, in a piece aptly entitled: "Repeal Prohibition, Again." This has already shifted the debate so dramatically that some are now comparing it to the impact of Walter Cronkite coming out against the Vietnam War (after which, President Lyndon Johnson famously said: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America"). While I'm cautiously optimistic and certainly think it will further the conversation, I have to say I think it might be just a little too early to declare this moment in time to be marijuana's tipping point. I think we're fast approaching that moment, but I don't think we've gotten there quite yet.

The Times editorial is certainly a positive contribution to the marijuana legalization debate. Even more so, as the current editorial will just be the first of a reported six-part series of editorials which examine the issue from more than one angle. That, right there, is a measure of respect that has been sorely lacking in most of rest of the media. It guarantees that various facets of the federal "War On Weed" will be examined, which should provoke a more in-depth level of political conversation than before. A conversation which has been, up until now, mostly only conducted by activists and mostly only at a local level (such as changing one state's laws). Yesterday's political talking-head television shows were forced to confront the issue, although for the most part this was nothing more than a competition by the pundits as to who could come up with the wittiest bon mot, rather than any sort of serious discussion of the issue.

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Planes have been dropping out of the sky at an alarming rate recently. I don't know what portents such omens signify, but the media certainly has had no lack of videos of debris fields to show, that's for sure.

Back in Washington, we have one week to go before the opening of "Silly Season 2014," an annual event brought on by hordes of political reporters scrambling around, devoid of actual stories, while Congress is away on its six-week vacation. What will the main Silly Season story become, for pundits to endlessly obsess over this August? Your guess is as good as mine. Several candidates have already popped up ("Hey, let's all talk about impeachment!" for starters), but perhaps some lonely town hall meeting (with some hapless member of Congress) somewhere in the hinterlands will provide the fodder for this year's Silly Season obsession -- hopefully, with an epic rant caught on video!

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For years, Harry Reid refused to act. He struck deals with Republicans (that always soon collapsed), and shied away from using what was called (at the time) the "nuclear option." As a result, judicial and other presidential nominations languished in the Senate, unvoted-upon. Because Republicans could filibuster any nominee they wished, they essentially decided to filibuster all of them. Finally, late last year, Harry Reid had had enough. He called for a vote to change the Senate's rules (fun historical note: the filibuster is not actually mentioned in the Constitution), and from that point on all executive and judicial nominees (below the Supreme Court) would be confirmed only by a majority up-or-down vote. We are about to see why this was so important, in the current "Obamacare can't give subsidies to customers of the federal exchange" court case.

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I had intended to write a column today to take an overview of all the close races for Senate seats. Every so often, I like to take a look at what the chances are for both parties to make gains in November (or, this year, to see whether the Republicans are going to gain a majority, realistically). Instead, after seeing the recent news from the New York Times, what is now called for is kissing goodbye any chances that the Montana Senate seat up for grabs will stay Democratic. To be blunt: there is now exactly zero chance of that happening, and we should all chalk up one guaranteed Republican gain in the Senate. The revelations that John Walsh plagiarized a major paper in college have now completely torpedoed his chances for retaining the seat. To be fair, there was little chance that Walsh was going to win in any case. But the difference between "little chance" and "no chance" can be measured in hope. There is now no hope for Democrats in Montana, this year.

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Every few Julys, I like to re-run the following column. Since this year marked the 45th anniversary, I thought it'd be appropriate once again. The last sentence in the second paragraph should now rightly read: "Even today, after watching the news on Sunday?" but few other updates to the text would be necessary to bring it up to date (although I did tend towards a lot of exclamation points that might have been more judiciously edited out, in that note at the end). In any case, please join me in this salute to a man whom many have forgotten (or at least, can't readily identify anywhere near as easily as his two companions).

Originally published July 21, 2009

Quick -- who was Michael Collins?

No, not the Irish patriot who had a movie named for him, but the American Michael Collins. Don't recognize his name? Even today, after watching yesterday's news?

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President Obama faces a dilemma on immigration reform, and it goes beyond the current problem of children at the border. If he sticks to his announced timetable, Obama will act in some way on immigration reform in the next month or so. The Republican House has already signaled that it not only won't vote on the bipartisan plan passed by the Senate last year, but also that it won't hold any votes on immigration reform at all in the foreseeable future (before the midterm election, in other words). This means if anything is going to happen, Obama will have to make it happen on his own. Obama's real dilemma is that no matter what he does, it's not going to satisfy everyone. In fact, it may not satisfy much of anyone. But it is sure to annoy and even enrage certain groups.

No matter what Obama does, if he acts in any meaningful way at all he's going to enrage Republicans -- both the politicians and their base voters. It's a pretty safe bet that the word "amnesty" will figure prominently in their complaints. But if whatever Obama announces is seen as not going far enough, he's also going to annoy some Democrats and a lot of Latino activists. Anything short of green cards for all 11 million undocumented immigrants could spur cries of not doing enough to help. That's a pretty tough tightrope to walk.

This dynamic existed even before the problem of child refugees was brought to the attention of the American public, it bears mentioning. The problem of what to do with the children only exacerbates Obama's dilemma, since it makes any executive action on immigration a much tougher sell. Even if we hadn't all been seeing child refugees on television for weeks, Obama still would have had a tough time, but now it's going to be a lot trickier. To his credit, so far it seems that Obama is not going to allow this separate problem to stop him from acting -- although this could indeed change. The White House has so far not signaled that it is going to back off from announcing some sort of policy change in the next month (it's always been assumed that such an announcement will come in August, when Congress is on its month-long vacation). But now any new policy shift may have to also take into account the child refugee crisis, since it is looking more and more likely that Congress is going to refuse to act (before it scarpers off on vacation again).

Exactly what Obama is going to announce isn't clear, at this point. I've seen speculation that he may announce that undocumented parents of American children will be somehow legalized in a way similar to how the "DREAMers" were. I've also heard rumors that whatever Obama will announce may include up to half of the 11 million currently in America illegally. Either of these would be a momentous policy shift, but because these rumors exist it also means that anything short of this may appear too timid for some Democrats.

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