There are several reasons why Obama’s executive action on immigration has put Republicans in a terrible bind. There’s the fact that conservatives are likely to respond by demanding a hardline position from the party’s 2016 nominee, torpedoing his or her electability. There’s the growing risk that conservative anger will force Republicans to do something epically stupid in the near term, like shut down the government.

Both of these reactions would be damaging. But, in fact, there’s a far deeper kind of damage that conservatives are about to inflict on themselves. It has the potential to set the party back years.

Anyone who’s followed politics during the Obama era has probably noticed that conservatives love to couch their positions in the language of process. So, for example, conservatives rarely admit they want to disenfranchise poor people and African Americans. They talk about the scourge of voter fraud, and the cosmic unfairness of letting ineligible people cast votes. (Never mind that documented cases of voter fraud are about as frequent as space-craft landings on comets.)

Or, take Obamacare. Conservatives rarely make the argument, which many seem to believe, that the program was essentially a pander to key Democratic constituencies, like the sick, the poor, and single women. Now that the program is working beyond expectations, they even shy away from criticizing the sort of risk-pooling that allows the previously uninsured to obtain insurance. Instead, they obsess over any indication that the law was passed through trickery. (See here for why that’s utter nonsense.)

Politically, it’s easy to understand why Republicans argue at the level of methodology, rather than owning up to their underlying beliefs. Saying you think too many black people vote, or that Democrats give too much free stuff to poor people, really isn’t the way to win elections these days. Just ask Mitt Romney, one of the few national politicians who didn’t grasp the need to conceal his actual views on these questions.