Republicans can’t resist sinking their teeth into a constitutional controversy, with good reason. They take the Constitution seriously and are genuinely appalled by the way President Obama has stretched and distorted executive powers to the detriment of the body politic. He has begun to institutionalize governance by insult, deception and bullying. But the remedies for all that rest in three venues and should not subsume everything else the GOP does for the next couple of years.

The best legal challenges to the executive order will come from the states in court. Congress can admire their efforts from afar, but it has no real role. Let the states run with this one.

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Another remedy for Obama’s executive order — indeed his entire presidency — comes in 2016. Let Hillary Clinton defend the mess Obama will leave behind. Let her figure out how to simultaneously give voters that “new car smell” and run for Obama’s third term, as the liberal base will, at the very least, demand. (Its preference is to go farther to the left, of course.)

And the final remedy is in Congress, but at the margins. Through a censure resolution and a good-faith attempt to attach riders to disable funding for actions that they believe go beyond mere executive discretion, Republicans can make their point. But these should constitute a tiny portion of what Republicans should do next year.

Far more important to the country and the health of the GOP would be action to stem the Iran fiasco, pass an energy bill, coalesce around an Obamacare alternative and advance other proposals to assist the middle class and poor. Immigration may inflame talk show hosts and one segment of the right-wing base, but it is not high on the list of voters’ concerns. Their concerns lay elsewhere. They are experiencing the middle-class “squeeze” and feeling besieged as domestically and internationally we seem to experience nothing but turmoil. With events spinning out of control, do the Republicans want to be seen as doing nothing but calling the president a rogue monarch?

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As to the sense of disorder, we have a vacuum in leadership at the national level as the president seems to shrink with each day. That badly needed leadership — mature, purposeful and sensitive to the concerns of actual voters — can come from governors or leadership in the House or Senate. Republican, however, had better make sure it comes from some portion of the GOP and not the Clinton Democrats. The GOP wants to be the party that steadies the ship of state and guides the country in the last two years of a rocky presidency.