Obama needs to call the GOP's bluff on immigration

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has a warning for President Obama, who suggested earlier this week that he would pursue immigration reform through executive action. "I've made clear to the president that if he acts unilaterally on his own outside of his authority," Boehner said, "he will poison the well and there will be no chance for immigration reform moving in this Congress."

A day earlier, Senate Majority Leader-designate Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a similar warning, saying unilateral immigration reform would be like "waving a red flag in front of a bull."

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus taunted Obama, saying the president has "been talking about immigration reform for seven years," suggesting that he's bluffing now.

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But it's Republicans who are bluffing. And Obama should call them on it.

Bluffing's actually an imprecise analogy. It suggests you have cards to play. But Republicans already played their hand on immigration. The first part of Boehner's threat is the overt warning that immigration reform is dead in the Republican-controled Congress if Obama acts alone. Well, as The Wall Street Journal notes, nobody thinks the 114th Congress will pass immigration reform anyway.

"In outlining their plans for the year, neither Mr. Boehner nor Mr. McConnell put immigration on the agenda," report Carol E. Lee and Peter Nicholas. "In fact, if Mr. Obama goes through with an executive action, there will likely be a congressional effort to undo it."

If Boehner were going to act on immigration reform, he would have done so after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill with a filibuster-proof majority in 2013, shortly after the GOP had identified winning Latinos as an existential imperative.

In fact, Lee and Nicholas say in The Wall Street Journal, Boehner and Obama held secret talks about immigration reform for a year. Obama agreed to postpone executive action on immigration until after the summer, to give Boehner time to get a deal made in his caucus. The talks ended with Boehner's announcement that he's going to sue Obama over his executive actions.

That brings us to the second part of Boehner's threat, the part about Obama acting "unilaterally on his own outside of his authority." Obama, in his press conference Wednesday, vowed to "take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system." You can bet he's not going to do anything the Justice Department and Office of Legal Counsel think exceeds his authority. Boehner can sue and see if a court will mediate — good luck with that.

And here's the final piece. Boehner and his fellow GOP leaders aren't just threatening to withhold something they can't deliver anyway — they are threatening to withhold something they still need.

Latinos are angry that Obama threw them under the bus by not acting before the election, but they still gave Democrats 62 percent of their votes (in a terrible year for Democrats). As Obama told Boehner in their discussions, "There will never be another Republican president again if you don't get a handle on immigration reform."

Republicans, traditionally in favor of a robust executive branch, may be hoping that Obama falls into a trap, enacting unpopular immigration measures and bolstering their assertion that he's an imperial president. Maybe the second part will stick, but voters are with Obama on this issue.

Even among the Democrat-slaying electorate that showed up on Tuesday, 57 percent favored giving illegal immigrants a path toward legal status.

Republicans in Congress have every incentive to get stuff done, and every incentive to make nice with Latinos. Obama has every incentive to show Latinos who has their back, and that means making Republicans carry out their pledge to try and block his small-bore executive actions.

I'm not much of a poker player, but I know whose hand I'd rather have.