Boehner: Obama needs to spend more time talking with Democrats

House Speaker John Boehner is sick and tired of all that finger pointing (in his direction) After bellyaching endlessly about how President Barack Obama doesn't spend enough time reaching out to Capitol Hill Republicans, the GOP has been getting what they've asked for over the past couple of weeks with a charm offensive from the president that includes dinners in hotels, invitations to the White House, and even presidential visits to Capitol Hill.

And now, after President Obama met with House Republicans yesterday afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner is offering his reaction in a Washington Post op-ed. It comes down to this: It's nice that the president has been engaging in dialog with us, but the real question is whether he's willing to spend more time talking with Democrats to convince them to do what Republicans want. In Boehner's words:

For all of Washington's focus on the president's outreach to Republicans, it's his engagement with members of his own party that will determine whether we succeed in dealing with the challenges facing our economy.

So the president does what Republicans have been asking for'spend more time talking directly them'and the response of the leader of the House is to say that the real issue is that Obama needs to talk to his own party. Gee, who could possibly have predicted?

To the president's credit, he knew going into the meeting that it wasn't going to be a game changer, telling ABC News that he understood the gap between the parties "may be too wide" for a Grand Bargain. And by all indications, the reaction of House Republicans after yesterday's meeting supports that hypothesis. The New York Times quotes Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) summing things up:

'Well, he doesn't want to balance the budget in 10 years, and he wants tax increases, and he wants new spending,' Representative Darrell Issa of California said as he left the meeting early. 'But other than that, we're close.'

So at this point, it looks like we'll be stuck with the sequester and the prospect of Republicans trying to force another fiscal crisis with the debt ceiling this summer and the upcoming budget battles, potentially this spring but almost certainly in the fall. It would be tempting to blame Republicans for the paralysis, given that this pattern of government-by-crisis started when they sold their soul to tea party austerity in 2010, but let's be fair: President Obama waited until after the election to tell us that he didn't possess Jedi-mind trick powers. If he'd been more honest, maybe Mitt Romney would have won.

In all seriousness, a lot of people are going to suffer thanks to the Republican refusal to replace the sequester. At this point, probably the only way we're going to get rid of it is if Democrats somehow win the 2014 midterms. Two years is way too long to wait for the return of sane policymaking, but thanks to Republicans, it doesn't look like there's any other choice.