Obama heightens his opponents’ contradictions

Stay wide awake in the coming weeks. This is a historic moment when all of the divisions, misunderstandings and hatreds of President Obama’s time in office have come to a head. We are in a different place than we were. We are also in a place we were bound to get to eventually.

Obama’s decision to back away from our government’s policy of ripping apart the families of undocumented immigrants has called forth utterly contradictory responses from Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. It should now be clear that the two sides don’t see the facts, the law or history in the same way.

Conservatives say the president’s executive actions on immigration are uniquely “lawless” and provocative. Progressives insist that Obama is acting in the same way that President Reagan and both Presidents Bush did. They recall that after the second President Bush’s immigration reform bill failed in the Senate in 2007 — it was very similar to the 2013 bill Obama supports — White House spokesperson Dana Peri- no declared flatly of the administration’s willingness to use its executive powers: “We’re going as far as we possibly can without Congress acting.”

Yet perhaps facts are now irrelevant. There was an enlightening moment of candor when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., visited MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on the morning of Obama’s immigration speech. “The president ought to walk into this a lot more slowly, especially after an election,” Coburn said. “This idea, the rule of law, is really concerning a lot of people where I come from. And whether it’s factual or perceptual, it really doesn’t matter.”

Yes, for many of the president’s foes, the distinction between the “factual” and the “perceptual” doesn’t matter anymore.

But mainstream Republicans seem as angry at Obama as the tea partiers. They argue repeatedly that by moving on his own, Obama has made it impossible for Congress to act.

You’d think that Republicans who genuinely support immigration reform would want to prove the president wrong in a different way: by passing a comprehensive bill. That only a few of them are saying this is an obvious sign to the president’s supporters that Obama is right in suspecting that the House GOP would continue to bob and weave to avoid the issue — as they did for the one year, four months and 24 days between the passage of the genuinely bipartisan immigration reform bill in the Senate and Obama’s announcement.

In a superb reconstruction of why the president decided to move on his own, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin, Ed O’Keefe and David Nakamura note that the last straw for Obama was House Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to say after the election that he would bring up an immigration bill if the president agreed to postpone executive action. In the absence of concrete pledges that something would get done, there was no point in waiting any longer.

All this explains the jubilation among progressives. They not only agree with the substance of what Obama did but also see him as finally calling the bluff of his opponents. He has forced the contradictions of the Republican establishmentarians into the sunlight.