From left, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, Rep. Jeb Hensarling and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise are pictured How GOP's play on spending could backfire

Who loses more if Republicans bail out again on the annual appropriations bills: the White House or the GOP itself?

The political right is up in arms over President Barack Obama’s planned announcement Thursday that he will use his executive authority to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation proceedings. And the argument goes that by pushing the pause button, Republicans in Congress can somehow punish the president because he believes most in an activist government.


But in truth, the landscape is very different from just a year ago, and the numbers show that Obama gets little new money in 2015 whatever the outcome, while the GOP may be cutting off its nose to spite its face.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama to shield 5 million from deportation)

The options include an outright shutdown or bare-bones continuing resolution — either short or long term. But all these alternatives fall short of an omnibus spending bill or even hybrid CR and would sacrifice important pieces of the Republican agenda.

For example, the GOP prides itself on caring about national defense, but a CR means Congress is walking away from updating the Pentagon’s $91 billion-plus procurement account. After enduring election-year attacks for being insensitive to women, Republicans would be turning their backs on $41 million in new money promised last spring to help state and local police investigate unsolved rape cases. And for all the talk of growing jobs with more foreign trade, money would be lost to make American ports more operational.

Last June, the Republican-controlled House approved at least $1.1 billion to address the backlog in dredging waterways — a big issue for the lower Mississippi River and major ports in Southern red states. If Congress now goes with a CR, Obama loses nothing here. In fact, the president gets to spend what he thinks best — almost $200 million less than what Republicans want.

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But perhaps the greatest irony lies with the United States Citizenship and Information Services, or USCIS, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that would be charged with implementing any new executive order from Obama.

The USCIS estimated budget of $3.2 billion is funded from fees collected on processing applications. While Congress can impose limits on those expenditures, it is largely independent of the more general appropriations process. Thus, if Republicans were to shut down the government or revert to a stopgap CR, it would do little or nothing to impact the very same agency charged with implementing the president’s decision.

“From a state like Alaska, where we have more federal employees per capita than any state out there, more public lands than any other state, a CR is a lousy way to run a government,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski. | Getty

These examples are much more than a few odd Washington Monument false closings. For anyone who looks, the numbers show a troubling pattern for the GOP.

From weather satellites, to Western lands policies and Indian health services — even the 2020 census, Republican priorities are at stake. What were all those Benghazi hearings about if the GOP is going to walk away now from new funding for embassy security? If immigration is the dominant issue of the day, does the GOP want to bail on the millions approved by the House to hire more judges to reduce the backlog of cases — over 400,000 at the end of the summer?

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“They are blinded by their political opposition to Obama,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, who doubles as a floor manager for the Pentagon’s appropriations bill. In that measure alone, literally scores of decisions would be put on hold under a CR. These impact the long-term costs of contracts and new starts for the Air Force and Army, not to mention the first national competition to replace, yes, a missile engine made in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In Washington these days, it’s become almost a cottage industry to psychoanalyze the president. Is it time to consider the reverse: how Obama gets inside the GOP’s head?

Again, follow the numbers.

Obama is a Democrat whose administration has initiated more than 225,000 deportation proceedings annually — 11,000 more than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Moreover, Obama has done this from a smaller pool as border crossings have dropped significantly from the early levels under Bush.

Recent estimates by the Pew Research Center indicate that the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States has been relatively stable at about 11.3 million — down by about 1 million from its peak before the Great Recession, which Obama inherited after the 2008 election.

“What I worry is we do a lazy job of managing the money,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander. “We’ve cut out a project every year for the past three years. Whenever we do a CR we waste money by not doing that.” | AP Photo

In the same period, Republicans have largely succeeded in boxing in the president by denying him the increased domestic discretionary funding he once hoped for in his last years in office.

The budget deal in December a year ago, allowed the administration to restore about $22.5 billion for nondefense spending reduced by sequestration. But the cap for nondefense appropriations in this 2015 cycle is virtually frozen at $492.4 billion. In 2016, the needle barely moves again.

In 2011, House Republicans could argue that they were able to force real cuts through a series of short-term continuing resolutions, which narrowly averted a shutdown. But the world is a different place today.

In fact, when adjusted for inflation, the 2015 cap on nondefense appropriations is already well below what Bush enjoyed at the end of his presidency six years ago.

This context is important to understanding the budding confrontation now.

Obama — a lame-duck president faced with a Republican Congress — is proposing to use his executive authority to buy leeway for himself on who will next be deported from the U.S. The president’s critics argue this is a desperate overreach to try to permanently reshape the battlefield over immigration reform by potentially issuing work permits to millions. But if Obama is going too far using his executive power, is the best response for Congress to walk away from its constitutional power of the purse?

Part of this is language. In Washington shorthand, the 12 annual appropriations bills are commonly written off as simply “funding” the government or “keeping the doors open.” Major newspapers largely ignore the process, and it has become such a shambles in recent years that many in Congress have no idea of how it is supposed to work.

This disorder feeds into the rhetoric that Congress is “shutting down” Obama by denying funds. But instead of “funding” the government, if the bills were described as “managing” the government, the tone might be very different.

Listen to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) — a former governor — describe his role in writing the annual energy and water budget.

“What I worry is that we do a lazy job of managing the money,” Alexander said. “Like in our energy and water subcommittee, we’ve cut out a project every year for the past three years. Whenever we do a CR, we waste money by not doing that.”

“From a state like Alaska, where we have more federal employees per capita than any state out there, more public lands than any other state, a CR is a lousy way to run a government,” said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who represents that state. “For us, you have things that are just on autopilot from the year before, it’s a bad way to operate.”

“I think he is overreaching if he does move forward with his executive action,” Murkowski said of Obama. “But we also need to make sure that we don’t overreach in response.”