I’m really going to enjoy the Buckwild Obama of the last two years of his Administration. The President has always been playing the long game, and though some announced his Presidency as “over” even before the Democratic losses in the recent mid-terms, he’s continued moving forward with his policies and now really has no reason to listen to the shouting people on the TV box. With immigration reform, he’s also put his opponents on their heels. From Noam Schrieber at The New Republic:

“Intellectually, of course, conservatives understand the importance of sticking to procedural objections even here. They can read polls as well as the rest of us. And the polls say that while Americans overwhelmingly favor the substance of Obama’s preferred immigration reforms, they also oppose enacting the reform by way of executive fiat.

No surprise then that the conservative message machine has gone on at length about the ‘constitutional crisis’ the president is instigating. The right has compared Obama to a monarch (see here and here), a Latin American caudillo, even a conspirator against the Roman Republic. (Ever melodrama much?) The rhetoric gets a little thick. But if you boil it down, the critique is mostly about Obama’s usurpation of power and contempt for democratic norms, not the substance of his policy change. Some Republicans no doubt believe it. 

And yet, try as they might to stick to the script, there’s something about dark-skinned foreigners that sends the conservative id into overdrive. Most famously, there’s Iowa Congressman Steve King’s observation last year that for every child brought into the country illegally ‘who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.’

While King tends to be especially vivid in his lunacy, he’s no outlier.”