What Boehner tapping the brakes on immigration reform means: short-term gain for GOP, but also long-term pain… Immigration remaining a political issue come 2016 won’t help the GOP… How to parse Biden’s comment on 2016… Obama to sign farm bill into law… A second-straight disappointing jobs report… 2014 eyes will be on Montana… Also watching Michigan’s Senate race… And RIP, Marty Plissner.

FIRST THOUGHTS.

Boehner tapping the brakes on immigration reform means short-term gain but long-term pain for his party

So much for those immigration principles House Republican leaders unveiled last week. On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner hit the brakes on passing immigration reform because he said his GOP caucus couldn’t trust the president. “The American people, including many of my members, don’t trust that the reform that we’re talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be. The president seems to change the health-care law on a whim whenever he likes,” he said. “Listen, there’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws. And it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.” Although Boehner’s rationale is borderline illogical (if you can’t trust the president, why pass ANY laws? Hello, farm bill?), it does make perfect short-term sense for the speaker to hit the pause button here. As NBC’s Luke Russert points out, why take up an issue that divides your party, especially before what seems to be a favorable midterm cycle? Why poke your conservative base in the eye at the time when you’re trying to raise the debt limit? But in the long term, Boehner’s reluctance to push ahead is very, very risky, and it shows the limits of how much he’s willing to use his power.

Immigration remaining a political issue come 2016 won’t help the GOP

For one thing, the House not moving on immigration — after the Senate already did so last year — would make it clear to everyone that only one party is standing in the way of reform: the Republican Party. In the 2012 presidential election, Republicans were able to use this counter-argument on immigration: “If this is so important to the president, why didn’t he move on this in his first term when he had a Democratic Congress?” It was a fair rebuttal. But what the public — especially viewers of Telemundo and Univision — WON’T buy is: “We’re not going to consider this legislation because we don’t trust the president.” More importantly, hitting the brakes on immigration reform won’t do anything to solve the GOP’s demographic problems after losing the increasingly growing Latino vote by a whopping 44 points in the last presidential election. And while Boehner knows that bringing up immigration reform will divide his party, the problem is that the divide will still be exposed in the next presidential race. Indeed, just like Romney did in ’12, there will be political incentive for the GOP presidential candidates to move to the right on immigration in the primaries. We know how that turned out in the general election. By the way, one more point on this Boehner’s we-don’t-trust-the-president excuse: Obama is not going to be president after 2016, when much of the actual new immigration law (if it does pass) gets implemented.

How to parse Biden’s comment on 2016

Vice President Joe Biden discussed his 2016 thinking to CNN this way: “There may be reasons I don’t run, but there’s no obvious reason for me why I think I should not run.” That sentence is pretty easy to parse: I’d like to run for president, he’s saying (examples: his visit to Jim Clyburn’s fish fry, his wooing of key Iowa and New Hampshire politicos). BUT: there still could be reasons I don’t (the biggest one being Hillary Clinton). Bottom line: Joe Biden isn’t going to run for president if Hillary does. But if she doesn’t, he probably will. And so while Republicans are looking for a 2016 front-runner, the Democrats have two of them — Hillary and Biden. Yet only one of them will be running for president.