November 21, 2014 11:55 AM

Stanford: Will the GOP hold it together?

From the Left: Quorum Report’s liberal columnist Jason Stanford argues Republicans can save themselves by embracing immigration reform, rather than fighting the President on it

Nothing is less important in Washington these days than how Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration will affect millions of unauthorized immigrants. Obama has turned a population roughly equal to Alabama into taxpayers who can live in America without fear of deportation, and this town yawns. All anyone really wants to talk about is whether the Republicans will completely freak out or manage to hold it together long enough for the government to function.

And by “function,” no one is thinking that Congress will do anything so radical as pass laws or other things imagined as normal by the Founding Fathers. No, the nightmare scenario for Republicans is a mass of anger and confusion that could derail their plans to govern just as they got control of Congress. Put simply, the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.

The choice is coming down to suing the President, which no one thinks will work, defunding the President’s immigration executive order, which the Republican House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers says is impossible, and of course shutting down the government in some sort of a legislative tantrum. So far, Republican leaders have managed to keep impeachment off the table, but no one thinks the relative peace will last. That’s how angry they are.

The rest of Jason Stanford’s column can be found by clicking on the R&D Department.

By Jason Stanford