Sure enough, the following month 38 of the Senate’s 41 Republicans and every Republican in the House voted against Obama’s stimulus package, even though it contained far larger tax cuts, and far less actual stimulus, than progressives wanted. To the GOP, evidently, this constituted bipartisan magnanimity. Because two months later, top Republicans vowed that if the White House used the reconciliation process to pass health-care reform, the GOP would stop being so accommodating. “If they go down that road, I think the fur is going to fly,” warned Senate Republican Conference Vice Chairman John Thune in April 2009. A year later, when the White House actually went through with the reconciliation plan, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski predicted that it would “disable our ability to work productively for the balance of this Congress.” Utah’s Orrin Hatch vowed, “It could be war.”

Obamacare’s passage contributed to the GOP’s Tea Party-powered victory in 2010 and the standoffs over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling that followed. But it did not “disable” Congress’s “ability to work productively,” because when it came to the agenda on which Obama was elected, congressional Republicans had never shown any inclination to work productively to begin with.

That’s still the case today. If Obama “acts unilaterally on his own,” Boehner warned last week, “there will be no chance of immigration reform moving in this Congress.” This from a man who, as Jonathan Capehart recently pointed out, saw the Senate pass immigration reform in June 2013 with 68 votes and still refused to schedule a vote in the House, even though similar legislation would have passed there easily.

Boehner’s claim that Republicans are just dying to pass immigration reform, if only Obama abstains from executive action, not only contradicts his past behavior. It contradicts his past statements. Back in June, Boehner said he had told the president, “The American people and their elected officials don’t trust him to enforce the law as written. Until that changes, it is going to be difficult to make progress on this issue.” Since the chances of Republicans ever trusting Obama on immigration are zero, Boehner was essentially declaring that the chances of a Republican congress passing immigration reform are zero too. From Paul Ryan to Kevin McCarthy to Reince Priebus, other top Republicans have said much the same thing. The Washington Post declared this summer, “The two-year attempt to push immigration reform through Congress is effectively dead and unlikely to be revived until after President Obama leaves office.”

That’s why Boehner’s effort to hold congressional immigration reform hostage if Obama acts unilaterally is so absurd. Boehner killed the hostage long ago. Now he’s hoping that if he pretends it’s still alive, no one will notice the corpse lying on the floor.