Guess how Rep. Steve "cantaloupe calves" King (R-IA) feels about this?
Republicans are engaged in the predictable internal battle over President Obama's plan to take the much-needed action on immigration that the Republican-controlled House has blocked in Congress. It's a fight between a group that thinks it is absolutely worth shutting down the government over executive action on immigration and a group that thinks it can find a response that
the media's bipartisanship fetishists will accept and hold against Obama rather than against congressional Republicans.
On the shutdown-is-on-the-table side, you have your usual collection of extremists and racists, from Iowa Rep. Steve King to Georgia Rep. Paul Broun to:
The House should consider impeaching Obama if he gives legal protection to "people who have violated the law," said Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina.
Asked about GOP leaders who say the party will struggle to win presidential elections unless it gains more support from Hispanics — in part by softening its stand on immigration — Jones said, "They're weak!"
On the "let's figure out
how far we can go without the
Washington Post editorial board saying we're being unreasonable" side you've got Speaker John Boehner, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the like. People who noticed and cared that the last government shutdown didn't go so well for Republicans. Those people are theoretically in charge of how Republicans will handle this, but then, they were theoretically in control when Sen. Ted Cruz shut down the government in 2013. So who knows?
Both sides of the internal fight are in agreement, though, that for Obama to halt some deportations would be unacceptable lawlessness, never mind that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both did the same basic thing. Too bad for this point of view that a panel of lawyers at the annual convention of the conservative Federalist Society concluded that executive action would actually be legal:
“If Congress wants to restrain the discretion of the president, they are supposed to do what the separation of powers encourages them to do: Write the statute tightly so that it will be actually administered the way you want it administered," Baker said. "The reality is many members of Congress don’t care how it is administered until somebody squawks about it. They don’t read the statutes, so how do they know how it is going to be administered.”
Don't expect those views to feature in Republican outrage when Obama finally does what Congress has refused to do, though. And with Obama's announcement potentially coming
as early as Thursday, Republicans will have to hurry up and get that temper tantrum calibrated.