House Republicans are still silent on the question of whether Speaker John Boehner will try to void the Obama administration's directive protecting immigrants brought to the U.S. as children when he sues the president in the coming weeks. But in response to this article, Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel notes that the speaker did not cite immigration policy when he sent a memo to House Republicans last month in anticipation of the lawsuit. To wit, Boehner's memo laments that "[o]n matters ranging from health care and energy to foreign policy and education, President Obama has repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators, straining the boundaries of the solemn oath he took on Inauguration Day."

Obviously that list is less than definitive. It's, as Boehner himself writes, a range. If a reporter notes his job requires him to cover matters ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, he probably doesn't have just two things in mind. Likewise, somewhere on his march from ransacking health care and energy policy to foreign policy and education, Obama quite possibly ran afoul of an immigration law or two.

The question, obviously, is whether Boehner will ultimately decide to omit immigration reform from his lawsuit, either for political reasons, or because his legal team determines that Obama isn't actually exceeding his authority, or both. We still don't know, and I don't claim to. Steel's caveat is just one data point. But I do know that the GOP's short-term and medium-term political considerations come into tension here. I fully understand the political case against fighting Obama's deferred action program. Republicans are already doing a terrible job trying to escape their image as a party hostile to immigrants. It would be really tough to shake the Etch-a-Sketch clean after suing Obama to make him deport "Dreamers." But that's mainly a 2016 problem. The main objective of the lawsuit, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, is to find a sweet spot between railing impotently against Obama's executive actions and heeding the right's growing appetite for impeachment or picking a budget fight, ahead of the 2014 elections. To marshal the right's anti-Obama enthusiasm without necessarily indulging its politically disastrous instincts.

The problem with Boehner's strategy is that political reason doesn't always (or even usually) persuade Republican base voters. They're well aware that the powers of impeachment and the purse both reside squarely with the Congress, even if they don't appreciate how poorly the public would receive an actual impeachment vote or a government shutdown fight ahead of the election. And the risk is that a safer option like Boehner's will leave them totally unimpressed, or slavering for further action.

As Red State's Erick Erickson ably demonstrates: