Here’s what Obama did last night:
Ezra requests that Republicans formulate a real response:
Republicans need to decide what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country now. They need to take away Obama’s single strongest argument — that this is a crisis, and that congressional Republicans don’t have an answer and won’t let anyone else come up with one. …
That, really, is Obama’s advantage right now. Even if you think he’s going too far, he at least wants to solve the problem. Republicans don’t seem to want to do anything except stop Obama from solving the problem. That’s not a winning position. More to the point, it’s not a responsible one.
Bloomberg View’s editors echo:
It’s time for Republicans to put up or shut up. By now it’s clear what they’re against — the dreaded “a” word (amnesty). But what are they for? They can’t avoid that question any longer. Now that they are the majority party in both houses, they don’t have the luxury of sitting back and criticizing everything that Democrats propose. Now they’re in charge. They need to start acting like it.
Thomas Mann is in the same ballpark:
Let’s get serious. Republicans used their majority foothold in the House to guarantee that Congress would be the graveyard of serious policymaking, a far cry from the deliberative first branch of government designed by the framers. They have reduced the legislative process to nothing more than a tool in a partisan war to control the levers of public power. The cost of such unrelenting opposition and gridlock is that policymaking initiative and power inevitably will flow elsewhere — to the executive and the courts.
The Dish 