Almost every veteran Congress watcher likes Boehner. He is a good guy who has evolved in his congressional career from revolutionary bomb thrower to real legislator, and he has gone through a lot of highs and lows before achieving his dream and becoming speaker of the House. But look at where he is now! Boehner is less a leader than the prisoner of his own caucus, unable to pull it in a direction that does not meet the test of his most extreme members (who now number a majority of the majority, or close to it). He cannot count on the support of his leadership team -- and when one of them, Eric Cantor, has himself tried to pull the caucus back to some form of sanity, he has failed.

Boehner has used two strategies to stay on top. One is a passive-aggressive approach to agenda management -- wait to bring up bills that will not pass muster with the extremist hard-liners until it becomes clear that they all will suffer from inaction; this allows his members to vote against the bills while the Democrats bail them out. That worked three times, on the fiscal cliff, aid to Hurricane Sandy victims, and the Violence Against Women Act. But Boehner has very few get-out-of-jail-free cards to use this way.

The second strategy is designed to mollify his extremist hard-liners. That is, get out in front of them and promote or pursue extremist policies and rhetoric to show he is one of them. Thus, we have the Boehner who said recently, “Obamacare is bad for America.” And, “We are going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.” That is the same Boehner who has made sure the House spends more time and attention on dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare than everything else combined. And the Boehner who, after acknowledging many times that allowing the U.S. to default would be catastrophic, now says he will join in demands that President Obama accept draconian budget cuts -- in an amount equal to the increase in the debt limit, meaning hundreds of billions piled on top of the sequestration cuts -- before permitting an increase in the debt limit. That hard-line stance both makes the extremists feel better and boxes Boehner in when he most needs wiggle room.

Here is the looming problem: The House has nine -- count ’em -- legislative days in September to complete action on the appropriations bills that make up most of the government we see, and to try to reconcile their bills with the Senate, which has to act on the same 12 bills. The chances of that happening before October 1? Zero. But even if the House and Senate passed all the appropriations bills, chances are close to zero that they could compromise on them -- the gulf between the chambers is greater than ever, since the Boehner-“led” House tripled down on the tough sequester cuts for domestic programs (it cut deeper to meet the Ryan plan to balance the budget in 10 years, and it cut even deeper again to shift more money to defense than the sequester provides).