海角大神

As expected, the Obama administration has announced that it will delay any announcement of executive action on immigration until after the November elections:

As I noted when I wrote about this last month, there had been hints for the better part of August that the administration was considering pushing back any announcement of executive action on immigration until after the election. For the most part, this was due to the fact that Democrats in red states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, and North Carolina who are already facing tough reelection fights were privately urging the White House to not take any action that would potentially harm the party鈥檚 chances in the battle for control of the Senate. The theory, obviously, is that whatever action the president is contemplating would do more to energize Republicans in these states than it would to get Latino and other voters who might favor the actions to vote in a midterm election where turnout among such groups is expected to be low to begin with. Given this, and the fact that the senators in each of these states are all in battles that put them within or near the margin of error with their Republican opponents. Given that, the politically smart thing to do is to delay the action until after the midterms.

Of course, it鈥檚 unclear whether this delay is actually going to avert the negative reaction that Democrats feared from the executive actions to begin with. It鈥檚 fairly obvious that the delay is purely political, and while we don鈥檛 know what the substance of the actions the President is contemplating might end up being, it seems fairly clear from reports that what we鈥檙e looking at is some kind of expansion of the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program that the president announced in 2012. From the beginning, the tea party and other anti-immigration reform activists have branded that move, falsely, as some form of amnesty. In this case, it seems obvious that they鈥檒l use the the announcement of the delay to rally their supporters in the same way they would have used the announcement of executive action itself. In that regard, one wonders whether the president shouldn鈥檛 have just gone ahead and announced his plans now and let the chips fall where they may.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.听