Politics Trolling the GOP Is Obama fast-tracking his deportation plan to mess with Boehner’s leadership strategy?

Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Troll: One who posts a deliberately provocative message … with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument. — Urban Dictionary

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When the Obama administration last week began the process of preparing the media and the public about the president’s plan to unilaterally suspend deportation for millions of illegal immigrants, it did not go to a Latino outlet like Univision. It did not communicate to the liberal base via the Huffington Post or even old standbys like the New York Times and the Washington Post. The “exclusive” went to Fox News.

The reaction on Fox was what you would expect: pure outrage. Charles Krauthammer slammed the plan that day as an “impeachable offense,” and the following night he compared President Barack Obama to a Venezuelan “caudillo.” Bill O’Reilly accused Obama of wanting to “tear the country apart politically” and, the following night, of “subverting the Constitution and law.” Fox personalities quickly began musing about possible retaliatory measures like blocking all presidential nominees and defunding the entire Justice Department.

And now, we hear, the president plans to announce his decision Thursday, despite pleas even from Senate Democrats who would like him to wait until they can pass an omnibus spending bill and avert any shutdown threat. If he wanted to, of course, the president could minimize the risk of a disruption in government funding by simply waiting until the Dec. 11 deadline for the expiration of the latest spending bill. Obama is under pressure to make the move sooner from Hispanic lobbies and others who are angry with him for delaying until after the midterms. But it is very possible that the president has another motive as well: blowing up the GOP.

Despite the strong sense coming from the House Republican leadership that it has far more control over its caucus now than it did during the Tea-Party-fueled insurgency of 2010, no issue has more potential than immigration to ignite the hard-right base and embarrass Speaker John Boehner—especially after the speaker’s post-election warning to Obama not to “play with matches”—or to cause headaches for the GOP heading into the 2016 elections.

The White House knows this. Thus, we could be witnessing the deployment of a strategy in which the president does indeed play with matches, quite deliberately, and he’s about to throw one right into the tinderbox of the House GOP caucus. If, by leaking to Fox News, the White House’s “intention” was “causing maximum disruption and argument,” then Operation Epic Troll has been a smashing success.

Boehner and his team are said to be confident they can quell anger from the base and are reportedly plotting ways to avoid a shutdown, possibly with feeble “secure the border” legislation likely to get swatted down by presidential veto. At a press conference on Thursday, Boehner threatened that “all options are on the table” to stop Obama and huffed that “if he wants to go off on his own, there are things he’s just not going to get.”

But as he danced around questions of whether government shutdown was one of those options, Boehner implicitly exposed the continuing Republican divide between the pragmatic leadership and the rambunctious rank and file. On Fox News Sunday, Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune also awkwardly answered a question about a potential shutdown, telling host Chris Wallace “it doesn’t solve the problem, Chris, but, look, we’re having those discussions.”

Yet the conservative base and its loudest voices are already mounting an insurrection, with Rush Limbaugh thundering that Republicans should “man up” and shut the government down. All this will continue to put pressure on the Republican rank and file that will complicate leadership attempts to finesse the matter. Even if this doesn’t end up as a repeat of the September 2013 shutdown crisis—which might be easier for Republicans to avoid since far fewer Tea-Party House candidates made it into office in 2014 than did in 2010—it’s not unreasonable to think that Obama and his party will try at least to make the GOP look as extreme and divided as the Republicans looked back then.

There are some legitimate risks here for the president. Won’t ending his presidency with two more years of gridlock stymie his hopes to build a lasting legacy? Won’t gratuitously poking the Republican bear undercut, in the eyes of history, his longstanding claims that he was the victim of partisanship and not the cause? Won’t aggressively circumventing Congress validate Republican charges of an imperial presidency, risking the White House in the 2016 elections?

And yet it’s easy to see how the president might be thinking that the provocation is worth all these risks. Regarding the danger of gridlock, Obama likely is not sweating it, because the big remaining items on the presidential bucket list are not dependent on congressional Republicans. His climate agenda is in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency and the December 2015 U.N. Climate Change conference. His hope for a game-changing Iran nuclear deal is mostly in the hands of Iran (though he would need to be careful that a veto-proof bipartisan supermajority doesn’t derail it).

Yes, Obama needs Republicans to give him fast-track trade authority and grease the approval of still-in-flux multinational Asian and European trade agreements. But most Republicans want to do that for their own sake. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent mightily to elect a Republican Senate, would be quite displeased if Republicans tanked their trade deals out of pique.

Obama has also expressed interest in working with Republicans to pair corporate tax reform with infrastructure spending, modeled after existing legislation that has actually attracted some bipartisan support but is adamantly opposed by populist Democrats as a tax giveaway to multinationals. Even so, a recent Brookings Institution paper explained that “the biggest obstacle to business tax reform is the business community itself” thanks to a dense thicket of intracorporate disputes that have bedeviled Congress for years. And the odds of any corporate tax bill have not significantly improved by the Senate power shift, so Obama is not risking much by antagonizing Republicans.

Obama may not care about hurting Republican feelings, but he does need to care about public opinion. Even though the president will never be on the ballot again, an immigration executive action is only a legacy win if the next president keeps it on the books and it becomes the cornerstone for permanent legislation down the road. If he mishandles the politics and sparks a conservative backlash, he could doom his party and his policy.

Fortunately for Obama, bringing out the worst in Republicans serves both his political and his policy purposes. Whatever level of discomfort the public may have with executive action on immigration (and polls are mixed on the subject), we know from last year’s shutdown that what the public really hates is a congressional temper tantrum. Voters weren’t fully sold on Obamacare, either, but they were keener on proposals to improve upon it than a shutdown designed to throttle it.

And we know from the 2012 defeat of Mitt Romney, as well as the 2010 defeats of Western Senate candidates Sharron Angle and Ken Buck, that Republicans are in dangerous territory with swing-state Latino voters when they retreat to their anti-immigrant corners. An unhinged response to the delivery of tangible relief to millions of people would be devastating to the Republican project of rebranding their image among Latinos. As the Republican National Committee’s 2012 “autopsy” found, “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States … they will not pay attention to our next sentence.” Once Republicans oppose Obama’s executive action, they will be able to save on verbiage.

A cohesive, pragmatic Republican Party could easily wriggle out of Obama’s trap: oppose the order on procedural grounds but move its own immigration reform, through the Congress it will soon control, that would allow the undocumented to stay and work. It’s a strategy that Obama is gleefully suggesting from the bully pulpit, knowing full well Republicans are in no position to take him up on the offer.

Republicans will have little choice but to snub Obama, and Latino voters, because they have done nothing to resolve their internal differences that prevented the House from passing reform the past two years. The New York Times’ David Brooks this week lamented that Obama is missing a grand bipartisan opportunity since “many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way.” But whatever idle chatter may be going on in the more rational corners of the party with which Brooks breaks bread, nothing in the midterm campaign suggests Republicans are poised to act.

Ignoring how red-state Sens. Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander coasted this year after voting for the comprehensive immigration reform bill, many Republicans running in right-leaning lily-white states railed against “amnesty” as if 2012 never happened. In turn, party leaders are in a weaker position than after Romney’s defeat to take on their anti-immigrant faction and pass reform that would grant 11 million undocumented immigrants legal status, let alone citizenship.

It’s also possible that the president’s decision to wait on his immigration executive action will prove politically wise for another reason. If Obama had followed through earlier, immigration would have received the lion’s share of blame for the Democratic losses, even though most of these Democrats (with the possible exception of Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who suffered a decline in Latino support) would have lost anyway. Immigration reform would have become toxic, scaring off both parties for the foreseeable future. Instead, by shielding immigration from the midterm maelstrom, Obama has a fresh rationale to act and knock the incoming Republican majority off its stride.

Brooks tut-tutted that Obama’s post-midterm actions are “bizarre” because, unlike his response to the 2010 midterm losses, he is not using the defeat as an opportunity to “rethink and refocus.” But that assessment completely ignores what Obama did after the 2010 loss: He kept his head down and his foot on the gas.

In the subsequent lame-duck congressional session, he repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” by winning the support of eight Senate Republicans. He strengthened food safety regulations with the help of 15 Senate Republicans. He surpassed the two-thirds Senate supermajority needed to ratify an arms reduction treaty with Russia. And he cut a bipartisan deal that extended both the Bush tax cuts and benefits for the long-term unemployed—a jiujitsu move that both provided immediate Keynesian stimulus and allowed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire two years later.

Granted, all that involved winning at least a modicum of Republican cooperation, mostly by shelving majestic speeches, keeping a low profile and depoliticizing issues. But that was no different than how he enacted Wall Street reform and sentencing reform earlier that year. He was pursuing the same agenda he had before, with the same tactics as before.

Yet, there’s one issue where that strategy did not work in the 2010 lame duck: immigration.

Conservatives who have been mocking Obama for failing to pass immigration reform when Democrats controlled Congress (Krauthammer last week said Obama could have passed “any immigration reform he wanted”) conveniently forget that he did try to pass the DREAM Act in December 2010. The legislation was considered to be the low-hanging fruit of immigration reform, as it helped only those in America illegally through no fault of their own. Yet Republicans filibustered it with the help of six Democrats.

The low-key approach didn’t work on immigration in 2014 either, even after Obama praised Boehner’s commitment to immigration reform, abandoned his insistence on a single comprehensive bill and publicly deferred to Boehner’s stated desire to break it up into “multiple pieces.” Time and time again, Republicans have proven unable to dislodge themselves from the grip of the anti-immigrant zealots.

These repeated legislative failures, despite a preponderance of polls showing majority support for comprehensive reform, are probably what have prompted Obama to “rethink and refocus” on what it will take to help families stuck in legal limbo for so long.

Different tactics make sense for different issues and different times. Contrary to common perception, most of the legacy Obama has built comes from legislation passed with at least a few Republican votes—Obamacare was the exception, not the rule. Demands for Obama to be constantly combative from the beginning would likely have left him with fewer concrete accomplishments, perhaps not enough to have won reelection. But on immigration, there is no evidence to suggest this incarnation of the Republican Party is prepared to budge. Executive action is the only available avenue.

There is only one way to ensure that an executive action lives beyond one’s presidency: Make sure the opposing party can’t get near the White House. Driving Republicans crazy—and reopening the party’s divisions heading into 2016—is the best way to keep them away. That’s why Obama is going to troll so hard.