Wipe away your tears, Republicans. President Barack Obama’s deferral of enforcement against several million undocumented immigrants is a short-term defeat for the GOP that you will turn to your advantage. It strengthens executive power, true, but in a way that will benefit Republican presidents much more than Democratic ones.

The deferred action program does not violate the Constitution. But it may modify political norms that control what the president can do. When presidents act, they typically invoke these norms, arguing that they can do X because a predecessor did X first. Obama’s defenders thus argued that Republicans shouldn’t complain about his deferred-action plan because presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan also deferred action against undocumented immigrants. Critics of Obama’s action worry that it establishes a broader political norm that enables the president to achieve, through non-enforcement, ends unrelated to immigration.

What might these ends be? Imagine a President Rand Paul entering office in 2017. An enormous regulatory structure will greet him, nearly all of it the creature of liberal policy-making going back to the New Deal, and it’s his to defer action on. Financial regulation required by the hated Dodd-Frank act, health regulation under the even more hated Obamacare, climate regulation despised by the coal industry, antitrust regulation opposed by big business—in all cases, President Paul will be able to argue that he can follow in President Obama’s footsteps and “defer action.”

Read more at The New Republic