Photo

Good Friday morning from Washington, where reaction to President Obama’s immigration plan has played out in some unpredictable ways. Republican governors are irritated because the issue hijacked their meeting in Florida, and Democrats worry that the White House will stumble in its sales job. In the Senate, Republicans preparing to take the helm are considering a return to the 60-vote majority needed to end filibusters.

Now that President Obama is forging ahead with his plan to protect up to five million illegal immigrants from deportation, he has to justify the move to the public and withstand an onslaught from Republicans who are determined to portray it as a historic abuse of executive power.

The administration is not known for deft salesmanship of its policies, and that gives some Democrats the jitters.

They fear that the rollout of the immigration plan could be as shaky as the disastrous start last year to the implementation of the health care law. Republicans are eager to draw the parallel.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky repeatedly compared the Affordable Care Act to the immigration plan on Thursday. “Just as with Obamacare,” he said, “the action the president is proposing isn’t about solutions.”

Democrats believe the aggressive Republican message machine has overwhelmed the White House on a range of issues, including the threat posed by the Islamic State and the administration’s handling of Ebola cases in the United States.

So they will be watching anxiously as the president makes presents his immigration case in Nevada on Friday and elsewhere in the days ahead.

— Carl Hulse

Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, is the man charged with carrying out most of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. That is likely to be a tough task: His immigration agents have been known to oppose the kinds of changes that Mr. Obama wants to make.

In a letter to the department’s employees, Mr. Johnson pledged on Thursday to meet with them “in person, by video conference or otherwise” to explain the changes. He will travel to McAllen, Tex., on Friday as part of that sales job.

“I support and recommended to the president each of the reforms to the immigration system,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “In my own view, any significant change in policy requires the insight of those who administer the system. I believe we have done that here.”

He’ll find out if that’s true beginning on Friday, near the banks of the Rio Grande.

— Michael D. Shear

It was a fittingly indignant coda to a Republican conference overshadowed by a Democratic president.

Under an ornate brass chandelier, Haley Barbour, the folksy former governor of Mississippi, fulminated over the rude and unwelcome way in which the Obama administration’s immigration action had dominated the annual meeting in Boca Raton, Fla., this week of the Republican Governors Association.

It was, he said, “irksome.” Not to mention a “waste of our time.”

So it went for the chagrined Republicans, who found that reporters who were curious about immigration kept veering from the governors’ script: trumpeting a red-splashed electoral map that has given the party control of 31 statehouses.

Mr. Barbour wore the look of a man who had paid to see a blockbuster action film and had instead sat down to a depressing melodrama.

“We hold this conference to celebrate our governors and talk about the policies and performance that these governors have produced,” he said. “Anything that takes a lot of time away from that really is a waste of our time.”

It was a message repeated over and over during the three-day conference, firmly, but mostly politely.

Mr. Barbour, however, was not interested in courtesies.

“If you all want to talk about it,” he said of immigration, “go somewhere else.”

— Michael Barbaro

On Thursday, Senate Republicans began addressing a big question as they prepare to assume control of the Senate: Will they reverse the Democratic rules that make it easier to break a filibuster on most White House nominees? Doing so now requires a simple majority.

At the party’s weekly private lunch, Senator Mitch McConnell set a Dec. 9 meeting for Republicans to weigh whether to restore the threshold to 60 votes.

Several Senate Republicans have argued it doesn’t make sense to go back to that requirement. But Mr. McConnell, who considers himself a guardian of Senate traditions, is thought to be eager to go back to the old ways to underscore how wrong the Democratic change was.

But his opinion might be changing. On Thursday, Mr. McConnell encouraged his colleagues to read a Wall Street Journal editorial arguing against a change back.

— Carl Hulse

President Obama heads to Las Vegas to talk about his immigration plan at Del Sol High School.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is meeting with President Petro O. Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk of Ukraine in Kiev before heading to Turkey for the next leg of his trip.

Speaker John A. Boehner will hold a 9:15 a.m. news conference to address how Republicans plan to respond to President Obama’s immigration overhaul.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana will campaign with her brother Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, ahead of her runoff election.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey says that he has gay friends but that he opposes same-sex marriage. As gay marriage is legal in New Jersey, we asked the governor if he would ever officiate at one. He had a ready answer: “I can’t officiate weddings because I don’t have that authority as governor of New Jersey.”

If he could, would he?

“That’s so ridiculous, a hypothetical,” he snapped. “I would never answer that.”

Well, we can be stubborn, too. Many governors can officiate at weddings, we noted, so it is not that ridiculous of a hypothesis.

“I don’t know if many of them can or can’t,” Mr. Christie said. “But I can’t, so why would I answer that? I don’t want to.”

Wait, did he not want to officiate at a gay wedding, or answer the question?

“I don’t want to answer,” he said. “Why would I?”

— Mark Leibovich

President Obama is not the first president to use his executive powers to help undocumented immigrants, but he will help far more than any of his predecessors, Julie Hirschfeld Davis says.

Senate Democrats got into a tense confrontation with the White House chief of staff over censorship of the C.I.A. torture report, Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse report.

Our correspondent in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, details the drama in the Iranian capital as the nation’s diplomats fly to Vienna to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry in a final push to reach a compromise on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York vowed to end the culture of violence at Rikers Island that leaves inmates “more broken than when they came in,” according to Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz.

Record-breaking snowstorms often have political repercussions (Mayor Michael A. Bilandic after the 1979 blizzard in Chicago, for example), and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has led the state response in Buffalo. Video of the governor is here.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has his eye on launching a presidential campaign this summer, according to Politico.

Allysia Finley, in The Wall Street Journal, looks at why California Republicans failed to win any additional congressional seats.

Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner says Democrats can win back the support of working-class whites and increase turnout among blacks and Hispanics.

Mississippi’s secretary of state is working with officials in neighboring states to schedule a Southern “superprimary” in 2016, The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson reports.

The Utah Legislature is considering a plan that would allow firing squads for executions, The Salt Lake Tribune says. (Utah was the last state to use a firing squad, in the execution of Gary Gilmore in 1977.)