Charlie Pierce lays it out:
So the president has set up a neat brawl among the Republicans with a move that has massive support even from most Cuban Americans. As we said before, very well-played indeed.
First it was the
executive order on immigration, which last month sent Republican base Klan voters into a tizzy and took precious time away from the party brain trust's efforts to control the news cycle and the message war. Then, just as the teabagger base members had simmered down a bit, Obama drops the Cuba bomb on them.
If he keeps this up, he'll keep them so busy trying to react to each move that they'll have a hard time acting. And the GOP only has a few weeks before the 2016 circus starts in earnest, and they have to focus on that.
More below the orange flag waving in front of the bull.
Here's some of what the LA Times had to say last month about Obama's immigration move:
The strong reaction by Republican leaders has less to do with opposition to the nuts and bolts of the president's immigration policy and more to do with fear and anger that the issue will derail the agenda of the new Republican majority before the next Congress even convenes.
Republican leaders who had hoped to focus on corporate tax reform, fast-track trade pacts, repealing the president's healthcare law and loosening environmental restrictions on coal are instead being dragged into an immigration skirmish that they've tried studiously to avoid for most of the last year.
And the loverly cherry bomb on that sundae? This:
To many, stark warnings from Boehner and McConnell sound more like pleas to the president to avoid reenergizing the GOP's conservative wing, whose leaders are already threatening to link the president's immigration plan to upcoming budget talks.
And we saw how well that worked out, eh?
The sequester, which got a fatal wound last year thanks to Ted Cruz and Mike Lee's Excellent Shutdown Adventure, has now been placed in the casket and is awaiting its trip to the cemetery. Federal employees, who until last year hadn't had a COLA in three years, get their second one in a row in the 2015 budget. NASA, perennial whipping boy of the GOP, got a modest increase from 2014's budget. Even the banksters' chief prize, the repeal of Dodd-Frank's swaps push-out rule, may come back to haunt the malefactors of great wealth:
Now, in a moment of supreme hubris, the masters of debate framing have overplayed their hand. Big banks succeeded in repealing the swaps push-out rule enacted under the Dodd-Frank Act by holding the government funding resolution hostage. But in so doing, they inadvertently thrust the issue of taxpayer subsidies back into the spotlight — where it belonged from the beginning.
And now, after the GOP's budget fizzle and Ted Cruz' own-goaling Mitch McConnell's efforts to keep all Obama's nominees bottled up, just as the GOP elites thought they'd got everything back under control, Obama's Cuba move does
this to them:
Despite these changes in the broader population and among Republican voters in particular, a candidate seeking the presidential nomination can’t take the risk of alienating the older voters who will play such a key role in the GOP primaries. And by bringing the issue to the front pages and the top of the policy agenda, Barack Obama has forced them to loudly take a position that will hurt whoever the nominee is in the general election. Not bad for a lame duck.
Indeedy.