Over at Bloomberg, I argue that Congress shouldn’t simply sit back and let the president rewrite immigration law.

Why not try to pass a funding bill that pays for all of the operations of the federal government except for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in the Homeland Security Department that would carry out Obama’s order? They could then try to pass another bill that just funds that agency — but with a restriction saying no money can be used for the president’s amnesty.
What would the Democrats do then? If they block a big funding bill that has nothing to do with immigration over the issue, it becomes hard to deny that they’re the ones shutting down the government to get their way. If they don’t block it, they’ll have no government shutdown to complain about — and the parties could move on to a more narrowly focused fight about the immigration budget. In that fight, Republicans would be holding a relatively strong hand: They would have funded the government, inconvenienced very few voters and gotten some real leverage.

This course of action would pose a risk of its own: It might come across as callous toward the legal immigrants CIS serves. But I think the strategy makes more sense than either doing nothing or engaging in a shutdown fight.