Becky Tallent, Speaker Boehner’s Big Immigration Hire

Rebecca Tallent, Boehner’s new staffer

Rebecca Talent has been causing a bit of a stir as of late: speculation has been allowed to run rampant as right wing media like Breitbart broadcast cries of amnesty, while left wing and independent organizations have been applauding the hire.  The only real consistency seems to be this: it’s all complete speculation.

Rebecca talent is the former chief of staff to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).  She recently was the director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and holds the view that undocumented immigrants should be offered a pathway to citizenship.

The problem is that, while Rebecca Tallent may be a strong voice for reform, there have been many strong voices for reform outright hounding Speaker Boehner, catching him at home, at his office and even at his favorite diner.  In Washington in general, there has been demonstration after demonstration to get Boehner’s attention from undocumented mothers sitting in the streets to members of Congress being arrested in the National Mall, as well as a Senate bill that passed with a large margin; the popularity of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); Evangelicals making headlines praying that Boehner would change his vote on immigration; family reunifications through border fences as a result of deportations making national news; demonstrators kneeling in front of deportation busses to stop them making national news… he has had plenty of opportunities to hear everything that even the most gifted of staffers would be able to inform him of, but he has yet to take any meaningful action, or allow a vote on the Gang of 8 immigration reform legislation.

The bottom line is that, while Boehner has said on tape on several different occasions that immigration reform does need to be addressed, he has not taken any of the several opportunities presented to him to address it.  This new hire may very well be something he did to appease immigrant rights activists as he plans to continue to drag his feet and let this immigration system be the next Speaker’s problem; at the moment, it’s too soon to tell.

Perhaps Ms. Tallent has a new way of providing information about immigration issues which all the demonstrators and lobbyists who have been hounding Boehner day and night on this very issue have not tried.

I doubt it.