Former House Speaker John Boehner has taken a step back from his promise on Wednesday morning to back House Speaker Paul Ryan for the GOP’s 2016 nomination.
“He has endorsed Governor John Kasich,” his spokesman, David Schnittger, told Breitbart News via email.
“His off-the-cuff comments this morning [in Florida] were about a hypothetical scenario in which none of the current candidates are able to secure the nomination at the convention,” said Schnittger, a “senior policy advisor” at the D.C. lobbying firm, Squire Patton Boggs.
Establishment GOP leaders are hoping to defeat Donald Trump’s drive for the nomination, and hope to vote through an establishment-friendly replacement, such as Kasich or Ryan — if Trump is not backed by a majority of the delegates on the first ballot at the July convention in Cleveland
On Tuesday, Kasich won his home-state primary in Ohio, giving him a platform to run for the nomination.
On Wednesday morning, at an event in Florida, Boehner declared his support for Ryan. “If we don’t have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I’m for none of the above,” Boehner said. “They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I’m for none of the above. I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee.”
But Boehner’s support for Kasich may be only a half-step back, because Gov. John Kasich shares the same cheap-labor, high-profits economic policy pushed by Ryan.
In July, for example, Kasich told Fox News that the economy needs “a guest worker program so people can come in, work, and then leave. Our program is too narrow now.”
Guest-workers are foreign workers who are hired instead of Americans, for example, when Americans ask for higher wages. The country imports roughly 700,000 extra guest-workers per year, creating a year-round resident population of roughly 1.5 million lower-wage guest-workers.
The country also accept one million legal immigrants each year and does very little to repatriate any of the few hundred thousand illegal immigrants who arrive each year to join the resident population of roughly 14 million illegals.
All told, the federal government accepts roughly two million new foreign workers each year, even as four million young Americans enter the workforce.
For more information about Kasich’s eagerness to replace Americans and their children with immigrants and guest-workers, read this Breitbart article.
Ryan supports the same cheap-labor policies as Kasich. For example, he favors an “any willing worker” plan that would allow companies to import foreign workers when Americans demand higher wages, and he favors President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would allow U.S. companies to export jobs held by U.S. employees and also to import an unlimited number of foreign workers for service jobs in the United States.
In December 2015, Ryan even inserted a new rule in the 2016 budget allowing companies to import roughly 200,000 extra guest-workers per year, even as GOP voters were showing their strong opposition to the use of foreign workers inside the United States. He has reiterated his die-hard opposition to any curbs on immigration and guest-workers this year.
Many establishment Republicans see Ryan as a substitute for outgoing Sen. Marco Rubio, was was shoved out of the GOP primaries March 15 after he supported the Democrats’ “comprehensive immigration reform, Gang of Eight” plan in 2013.
Boehner’s Wednesday support for Ryan came the morning after Ryan hinted he would want the nomination. “You know, I haven’t given any thought to this stuff,” Ryan told CNBC Tuesday. “People say, ‘What about the contested convention?’ I say, well, there are a lot of people running for president. We’ll see. Who knows.”
However, a poll released Tuesday by YouGov showed that only one-in-eight GOP supporters want the GOP establishment to oppose Trump if he wins the nomination.
Also, Boehner’s pro-Kasich and pro-Ryan statements may be misleading, if only because he seems to oppose the cheap-labor policies pushed by Kasich and Ryan.
In 2014, for example, Boehner blocked the huge immigration-expansion bill developed by Sen. Marco Rubio, despite huge pressure from business groups, Democrats’ diversity groups, and President Barack Obama.
Without Boehner’s resistance and delaying tactics, Ryan might have successfully pushed his own secret cheap-labor and amnesty bill through the House in 2014.
But Ryan’s scheme was foiled at the last minute when GOP primary voters defeated the GOP’s Majority Leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, in his June 2014 primary election.
Passage of Ryan’s amnesty and cheap-labor bill would have put the Democrats on a very fast-track to complete control of the White House, Congress, and the courts for several decades.
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