A few postscripts on this subject:

1) Some liberals have suggested that conservatives have acted in a self-defeating way: Republicans could have passed immigration legislation where they got something in return for amnesty, but now they will get nothing. Leave aside the important point that political and legislative calculations should not have to be done with the threat of extraconstitutional presidential action in mind. I don’t think the premise of the argument is right. The realistic alternative course of action for the Republicans would have been to pass something like the Senate immigration bill. That bill would have coupled an amnesty with increased enforcement, true, but also with a guest-worker program and a large increase in legal immigration, much of it low-skilled. What Obama is doing strikes me as on balance better than that bill, considered purely as a matter of policy. It is as a constitutional matter that it’s much worse.

2) Supporters of the president’s action have cited executive amnesties offered by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as precedents; opponents have pointed out that those amnesties were much smaller and were done in furtherance of congressional legislation that had actually, you know, passed; and supporters have responded that these differences do not matter. If the president can give a pass to one illegal immigrant, he has the authority to do it for 5 million; if he can do it to advance congressional aims he can do it to thwart them. This strikes me as a narrowly legalistic, what’s-the-most-we-can-get-away-with way of looking at the question. When President Obama said on previous occasions that he did not have the authority to implement, on his own, an amnesty less sweeping than the one he is set to announce tonight, he didn’t cite a specific legal text that tied his hands. He asserted that policymaking by him in this area would break with our constitutional tradition: that it would be inconsistent with our political system. If you’re thinking about the question from the standpoint of how to faithfully execute the law, that conclusion just seems to me, as it once seemed to him, to be obviously correct; and the size and political context of the executive action just as obviously matter.

One of the reactions I’ve gotten this week from supporters of the president is that nobody complained about the Reagan-Bush actions, so nobody should complain about Obama. It seems to me that this is like saying that if you let a friend borrow a pencil you shouldn’t mind if a stranger steals your car, because the principle of the thing is the same.

3) There seems to be a little bit of confusion about what Republicans can do. This is because the immigration bureaucracy that would implement Obama’s plan is largely funded by fees. Some Republicans have made it sound as though the bureaucracy is therefore beyond the reach of congressional legislation. This is untrue. There is absolutely no bar to the Republicans’ promoting a bill that keeps the immigration bureaucracy from spending money–however the bureaucracy has raised that money–from implementing Obama’s plan. What Republicans can’t do is force Senate Democrats or the president to go along with that bill. And Obama does not need a bill to fund the bureaucracy to get signed into law, because those fee revenues will still be available without that law. So we should not exaggerate how much leverage Republicans have or say there is a sure way to block Obama. I nonetheless think it is important to make the effort. And I suspect we’ll all have more to say in this space later.