THREE MARTINI LUNCH: FEBRUARY 23, 2015

National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: Oscars host Neil Patrick Harris's joke about Edward Snowden, the immigration politics of the filibuster, and why Dems think Obama should be able to ignore the courts at his discretion.



Senate GOP ready to split DHS funding and blocking Obama's amnesty into separate bills?

We knew it would come to this. Alternate headline: "Party that promised to avoid shutdowns will avoid shutdown."

At least we'll get some entertainment over the next few days from GOP aides trying to convince the media this isn't a total cave.

Senate Republican leaders are plotting a new strategy that they hope will allow them to prevent a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) next week.

They are considering a plan in which they would split off legislation attacking President Obama's executive action on immigration from funding for DHS, according to a Senate GOP aide familiar with the discussions.

Senate GOP leaders are also looking at dropping any effort to overturn Obama's 2012 executive action, which set up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Polls suggest this program is more popular because it helps illegal immigrants who came to the country as children…

"We would try to have a vote on just that issue," the aide added. "Does it have to be addressed as part of DHS, or can it be addressed separately? If we can get to that issue and have a vote on that issue, then you come back to DHS appropriations.

The point of the cromnibus in linking DHS funding to blocking Obama's executive amnesty was to put extra pressure on Senate Dems and Obama to agree to the GOP's demand. Want Homeland Security (or at least its nonessential agencies) to keep running? Aha! - better join Republicans in undoing O's immigration action then.

Two months later, delinking the funding is supposedly the way to put pressure on Obama and the Dems. Want to force Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill, and other centrists to take a truly tough vote on all this? Aha! - pass a clean funding bill for DHS, taking that issue off the table, and then present them with a new bill focused squarely on overturning Obama's November mega-amnesty.

You can tell your party's being run by master strategists when their grand plan for achieving an important goal involves doing the exact opposite of what they wanted to do as recently as six weeks ago. Gonna be a fun two years for the new majority...

Also read:

Lindsey Graham: DHS Shutdown 'Bad Strategy,' Republicans 'Will Get Blamed'

Obama Admin Response to Immigration Injunction: We Have to Have Amnesty...In Order to Secure the Border