House Speaker John Boehner (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Saying he wishes "someone would make it stop," Eugene Robinson writes at the Washington Post that watching Republicans try to persuade themselves that crushing immigration reform actually helps the party is almost like observing someone crash and burn.

Self-delusion is a sad spectacle. Watching Republicans convince themselves that killing immigration reform actually helps the GOP is excruciating, and I wish somebody would make it stop.

House Speaker John Boehner's unruly caucus has been busy persuading itself not to accept or even modify the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate. Rather, it wants to annihilate it. It's not that these Republicans want a different kind of comprehensive reform; it's that they don't want comprehensive reform at all.

The Obama administration "cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises to secure the border and enforce laws as part of a single, massive bill," Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership said in a statement. Instead, the idea is supposedly to deal with the tightly woven knot of immigration issues one at a time.

That's like sitting down with a piece of cake and saying, "First I'm going to eat the flour, then the sugar, then the eggs."

House Republicans think they can begin with "border security," which would be laughable if the need for real immigration reform were not so serious. It is ridiculous to think the nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico can be made impregnable.

Read Eugene Robinson's entire piece at the Washington Post.

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