Three Republicans.

Three “conservatives.”

Three supposed leaders in Congress.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and libertarian-ish presidential flirt Sen. Rand Paul. And you are welcome to them.

First Boehner, who lately is sounding like a man who has finally found an issue he’s willing to fight for, all the way to the bitter end: amnesty for illegal aliens.

During a speech to a Rotary Club in his southern Ohio district, Boehner expressed frustration that his fellow House Republicans haven’t gotten on the amnesty bandwagon (a vehicle designed and driven by the Democrats) to prove that Republicans are nice enough to deserve a share of the Hispanic vote.

How, amnesty-pushing Republicans ask, can a party that wants to win Hispanic votes be unwilling to forgive 12 million honest mistakes that involve wandering across the southern U.S. border and getting lost in “the shadows”?

Basking in the love of the GOP, the illogic goes, the Hispanics who can vote today will rediscover their

and contribute to a string of GOP victories as far as the eye can see. Hispanics who can vote later will, too, out of gratitude for their new citizenship.

members of the caucus he has “led” in the House of Representatives these past eight years: “Oh, don’t make me do this. Oh, this is too hard.”

This from a speaker who, when push comes to shove, is always first in line to get shoved. The courage to do hard things is not a subject on which Boehner should feel comfortable lecturing anyone. In a

, his method amounts to, “We shall fight them on the beaches. But if fighting becomes difficult, we shall give them whatever they want.”

A Republican surrender on amnesty would be disastrous for Republicans.

A Republican surrender on Obamacare would be fatal, first for the party and then for the country.

But repealing Obamacare would be hard. So say Rep. Rodgers and Sen. Paul.

They’re right, of course. Democrats are going to fight like cornered wolverines to keep the law in place, because it’s the lever they can hold over Americans forever — or at least until we all finally have to admit that a bankrupt Treasury can’t pay benefits — to keep the party of huge and paternalistic government in power. The people who are getting subsidies through Obamacare and freebies through expanded Medicaid, meanwhile, are going to fight like people who have been asked to give up free stuff.

The last thing Republicans, conservatives, people who care about U.S. medicine and people who want to retain a shred of their individual liberty and dignity should want to hear going into November’s midterm elections is Republican candidates trying to let them down easy on Obamacare. But that’s exactly what it sounds as if Rodgers and Paul are doing.

“It is a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to health care,” that isn’t working, Rodgers says.

Right. So what should we do?

Now,

there's

a stirring call to arms.

, “I think one of the practical things you might be able to do — and I think the public at large might accept this — is to make Obamacare voluntary.”

Memo to Sen. Paul: That would be hard, too. So why not just do the job that actually needs to be done, do it properly and do it as soon as possible? Sometimes, the hard thing to do is the thing the country needs the most.

Americans already know that Obamacare is a series of frauds perpetrated upon them by a president and a Democratic Congress that

to get it passed and have been afraid ever since to let it go into full effect because it will bring serious, widespread pain. The weight of those lies and the economic pain already surfacing ought to be a millstone around the neck of every Democrat in every race across the land.

And yet Republican “leaders” are stammering about

reforming the exchanges

?

The institutional Republican Party is bereft of leadership because its upper echelons are bereft of principle. The John Boehners and Cathy McMorris Rodgerses of the world are far more interested in prolonging their own comfortable situations — to wit, avoiding doing anything hard — than they are in doing what’s right for Constitution, country and constituents.

And if Rand Paul, a man widely thought of as the closest thing to success that libertarianism has produced and supposedly a Republican leader-in-waiting, is signaling a lack of interest in doing his utmost to repeal the most pervasive impingement on individual liberty any American now living has ever seen, he’s unworthy of either mantle.

Obamacare is a national character changer — a radical reversal of the relationship between the individual American and his government. If it stays in place, government eventually will own all of us.

Sure, overturning it will be hard. But Republican leaders who don’t see that overturning it is also a critical necessity or aren’t willing to put in the effort required for as long as it’s required don’t deserve to be called Republicans and shouldn’t be leaders of anything.

O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor.