If you believe John Boehner's words, he holds a strong negotiating position with President Obama.

If you watch his actions, they communicate weakness poorly masked by bluster.

“There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR" to reopen government, the embattled speaker told the country Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

His message on the debt ceiling was the same.

"We are not going to pass a clean debt limit increase. I told the president, there’s no way we’re going to pass one… the votes are not in the House to pass a clean debt limit.”

Two words, Mr. Speaker:

Prove.

It.

If the votes don't exist in the House to pass a clean budget renewal and debt ceiling, then schedule floor votes to prove it. Put up a clean budget resolution. Put up a clean debt-ceiling increase. Let's see what happens.

You claim to be holding a fistful of aces in your hand. You demand that the other side fold its own hand in light of that alleged fistful of aces. Yet you refuse to allow a vote that would let the rest of the world see those aces for itself.

Now why would that be? Because the bills in question would pass, and might pass pretty easily?

Your refusal is particularly odd because if you do hold those aces -- if there really aren't enough votes in the House to reopen government and avoid default -- then you would strengthen your negotiating position by clearing up any doubt. But still, you refuse to do so. You refuse to do so on your own, and you have blocked efforts by Democrats in the House to force a vote as well.

The Senate, by contrast, has voted four times now on budget bills sent over from the House. The House has refused to take any vote on budget legislation from the Senate.

Schedule a vote, Mr. Speaker. Allow the process to work as it is outlined in the Constitution. Let the House -- "the people's House," as you like to call it -- speak. Otherwise, we are left to conclude that the problem isn't the House. The problem is you and those extremists who now dictate what you are allowed to say, and what you are allowed to do.

Let's also deal with another part of the speaker's message. In his comments Sunday, Boehner spoke repeatedly of wanting a conversation or a negotiation with the president and Senate Democrats about the budget. It's part of his sudden effort to play the role of the reasonable man, just wanting to sit down to talk things through.

"The American people expect in Washington, when we have a crisis like this, that the leaders will sit down and have a conversation," he said. "I told my members the other day, there may be a back room somewhere, but there's nobody in it. We're interested in having a conversation about how we open the government and how we begin to pay our bills. But it begins with a simple conversation."

There are a lot of problems with the image that Boehner is attempting to project, but let's deal with just two:

1.) At Republican insistence, the Senate passed a budget resolution back in March -- seven months ago -- and then attempted to open budget negotiations with the House. The House refused to do so. For seven months, Republicans refused to name House members for a conference committee to talk things over, and the story has been the same in the Senate. Eighteen times, Senate Democrats have moved to name conferees to negotiate with the House over the budget. Eighteen times, Senate Republicans have blocked the naming of conferees.

As Paul Ryan admitted back in the spring, Republicans had no interest in negotiation. Their plan was to wait until the debt ceiling hit, and then use the sense of crisis and potential damage to the country to increase their leverage. So while a frustrated Boehner complained last week that "This isn't some damn game!", he has played it as a game, and not very well.

2.) What does Boehner hope to accomplish in these "negotiations" that he demands? As he indicated Sunday, the GOP is beginning to move off its demand to defund ObamaCare and instead wants to focus on entitlements:

"STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're saying you want a conversation now about changes in Social Security, changes in Medicare, changes in entitlements? Would you be willing to accept what the president has demanded for that kind of a negotiation, having new revenues as part of the discussion?

BOEHNER: The president got $850 billion -- $650 billion of new revenues on January the 1st. He got his revenues. Now, it's time to talk about the spending problem.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So that's a no?

BOEHNER: Very simple. We're not raising taxes."

In other words, Mr. Reasonable says, there will be no negotiating in these negotiations. Before they even begin, Boehner has established that he will demand major cuts in Social Security and Medicare that will hit middle-class and lower-income Americans hard, but he will not allow the wealthiest of Americans -- the top 1 percent that has garnered 95 percent of the nation's income growth in the past few years -- to share in any sacrifice.

His description of the previous budget deal -- "The president got $850 billion -- $650 billion of new revenues on January the 1st. He got his revenues" -- is also telling. Boehner does not mention the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts enacted through the sequester, nor the additional $1 trillion in other spending cuts negotiated with the president. It's as if they never happened. "He got his revenues ..."

In hiscomments on ABC, the speaker used the word "conversation" 10 times, but another "c" word, "compromise," was never uttered. The same is true of the op-ed piece by Boehner that appeared last week in USA Today. No mention of compromise.

That isn't a surprise, because Boehner's discomfort with the basic principle of compromise is well-documented:

This whole performance is quite extraordinary. You fabricate an unnecessary crisis by blocking every effort to negotiate until the very last second, in the process doing real harm to the country. You refuse to allow the House to speak, muzzling the people's representatives by blocking votes that would probably resolve this mess pretty quickly. You empower the extremists in your caucus, giving a minority in the House veto power over the majority. You insist on "negotiations," even as you make it clear that you have no intention whatsoever of negotiating.

And then you whine about how unfairly you are being treated.

Quite a performance indeed.