It began with tweets by Republicans:

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But then the White House started trolling them:

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The hashtag, which began trending, also inspired some political pundits to get in on the joke:

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But even ultra-conservative Republican Rep. Steve Stockman knew where to draw the line:

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This time around, House Republicans are fueled by the IRS scandal, because of the agency's role in distributing funds from the law. The Washington Post reports:

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"There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse. Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax exempt status," Boehner told reporters Wednesday. "I think we need to know who they are and whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law."

The Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation of the Internal Revenue Service just as another probe concludes that lax management enabled agents to improperly target tea party groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax exempt status.

Attorney General Eric Holder said he ordered the FBI to investigate Friday — the day the IRS publicly acknowledged that it had singled out conservative groups.

"Those (actions) were, I think, as everyone can agree, if not criminal, they were certainly outrageous and unacceptable," Holder said. "But we are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations."

Holder is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. It is the first of several hearings that will focus on the issue.

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“There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse," Boehner continued. "Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax-exempt status. I think we need to know who they are and whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law."

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that he has ordered the FBI to investigate whether any criminal violations occurred. Holder is scheduled to appear before a House committee on Wednesday, where he will likely face questions about this scandal, as well as the Department of Justice's decision to subpoena phone records from the Associated Press.

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To be fair, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has built a reputation for defending privacy rights, especially online. He said in a statement, “The burden is always on the government when they go after private information -- especially information regarding the press or its confidential sources. I want to know more about this case, but on the face of it, I am concerned that the government may not have met that burden,”

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Lawyers with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed House and Senate Intelligence Committee members in March about the emails, which ABC News released today to much hullabaloo, after officials said they would make them available to members of Congress in February.

Yesterday, Boehner called for the release of the emails, but the administration officials, who agreed to speak on a conference call with reporters only on the condition of anonymity, said today that Boehner would have seen them had he attended the briefing, to which he and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were also invited.

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As the Washington Post reports, Republicans have tried to use procedural tricks, in addition to full-on floor votes, to repeal Obamacare, meaning that the exact number of times they've tried is somewhat disputed. Some say it's been 33 times since 2010, others say closer to 40.

Cantor, R-Va., tweeted on Tuesday:

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From the Post:

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At a panel on Wednesday hosted by the Heritage Foundation, conservative Republicans criticized leadership for failing to bring forward a repeal in 2013. "We need to continue fighting for repeal. We need a clean vote on repeal," said Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who chairs the conservative Republican Study Committee.

From Sahil Kapur at TPM:

“If you’re a freshman — the guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare. Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say,” [Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C.] said. “We haven’t had a repeal or replace vote this year.”

“We have not had a chance as freshmen to do that,” said first-term Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL). “Even if it’s just symbolic — and even if we understand that process-wise we are not going to be able to say, okay we want repeal, it’s done, and it’s over. But this is the issue that so many people around the country who love the Republican Party are frustrated with.”

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Those Democrats were Heidi Heitkamp (N.D. -- a state that should not be a separate state from South Dakota), Max Baucus (Mont.), Mark Begich (big icy pool of oil by Canada) and Mark Pryor (Ark.). Baucus, Begich and Pryor are up for reelectiion next year. Heitkamp's excuse is that the entire population of her state is old white gun nuts. Liberals may call for those senators to be punished. Democrats will respond, correctly, that if those senators lose primaries to more liberal candidates, Republicans will win those seats.  The correct response, as always, is to eliminate the U.S. Senate.

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Anyway, initial responses ranged from the incoherent—”I don’t see this as fundamental entitlement reform as much as clarifying a statistic which does happen to save money” (Paul Ryan)—to the opportunistic “Let’s set aside our differences and come together on things we can agree on” (Eric Cantor saying let’s do CPI but not the higher tax revenues in the budget)—to the faux-outraged House GOP campaign chair Greg Walden who labeled the President’s budget a “shocking attack on seniors.”

It’s that last part where things got weird today.  As the WaPo reports, Boehner and Cantor are distancing themselves from Walden, since they want these cuts.  And the very conservative Club for Growth…

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We've given plenty of space to the detractors, and on Tuesday, two senior White House officials laid out their case to Salon and a small group of other reporters in a background briefing. Here's what they're thinking:

First of all, the officials insisted, the White House will not go any further than what they're offering now. As they see it, they went halfway with their last offer to House Speaker John Boehner and the CPI switch, so now they're looking to see if anyone will meet them there. This way, if a grand bargain never materializes -- which they acknowledge is the most likely scenario -- it will be harder for Republicans to blame them for killing it.

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There's not even lip service paid to the fact that Obama is risking mutiny in his own party by putting Social Security on the table. Instead, Boehner sees Obama's move a sign of weakness and demands more. "If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there's no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes," he said.

There's no way Boehner even had time to read the whole thing. And thus, the problem with pre-conceding to something that Republicans were not even asking for.

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The secretive House effort, which also aims to further tighten the border against foreigners crossing illegally into the U.S. and crack down on employers who hire them, has been overshadowed by the bipartisan negotiations in the Senate, which is expected to act first on immigration legislation. But it's an important indication that a number of lawmakers, including Republicans, in the conservative-dominated House want to have a say in crafting a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration law.

"We have legislative language that we'll be ready to go forward on, not concepts but actual language," Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, a leader of the group, said this week on "Capital Tonight," a program on cable news channel YNN in Central Texas.

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Rubio sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy in which he demanded more hearings. So, so many hearings. (Rubio's letter contained the word "hearings" six times.) And open amendments, which is basically asking permission for anti-reform senators to attempt to make a series of potentially toxic votes if they want their precious reform.

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According to the poll, which measured what Americans dislike about each party, 21 percent of national adults said Republicans don't compromise, including 26 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats. The second most common criticism was that Republicans are for "protecting the wealthy, not the middle class."

For Democrats, 14 percent said they spend too much, including 23 percent of Republicans, 11 percent of independents and 10 percent of Democrats. The second biggest criticism was that Democrats were also "unwilling to compromise."

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“This week, the House passed Republicans’ balanced budget that fully repeals and defunds ObamaCare to protect families, workers and seniors from its devastating consequences. The House will continue working to scrap the law in its entirety, and will use oversight authority to expose its harmful impacts as they continue to unfold,” Boehner said in a statement.

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The New York Times reports:

[The] new political landscape in Washington contrasts sharply with just a few years ago, when most Republicans derided the idea of legalized status for illegal immigrants as a form of amnesty that would simply encourage more people to cross the border illegally.

The overall shift in sentiment means that four months after Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, made “self-deportation” the party’s official position on immigration — and lost decisively to President Obama, especially among Hispanic voters — top party strategists and lawmakers of all ideological stripes are racing to change course.

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America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday's edition of ABC's "This Week" and admitted that "we do not have an immediate debt crisis." (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS' "Face the Nation").

In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn't just about the politics of a Republican House speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP's fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.

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