President Obama may be mostly preaching to a choir in a sparsely populated church tonight as he makes one of his most significant addresses to the nation.  The major TV networks will opt for their big-ticket, high-revenue entertainment fare like CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” and ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” as Obama outlines executive actions that will help perhaps four million undocumented immigrants avoid deportation and work legally in the U.S.  In addition, he'll tell viewers of Univision, MSNBC and CNN (among the few to cover him live) that as many of one million more will be potentially helped, including so-called “Dreamers,” or young immigrants who came here as children.  There were still some details that were unclear but, “My bet is that he goes big,” said John Mark Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.  “He's already signaled that he will act after the election, so he must. The Republicans are divided over how to respond. It can be undone by the next president, but once it's the status quo it's very hard to undo it and even harder the bigger it is.”  It thus raises a very tricky prospect for a Republican president even if the GOP captures the White House in 2016. “Is he really going to round up millions of people who raised their hands so that their families will not be divided and then deport them?”  And, at least for history’s sake, Obama can’t be necessarily accused of being too inclined with executive orders.  In terms of those, Hansen notes, he’s running behind George W. Bush and, for the moment, at a pace to have issued the fewest of any president in the past century.”  “The stakes are fairly high for the president and the party -- actually the parties -- grounded in the policy and politics more than in the speech itself,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin College.  He thinks that, as an act of persuasion, Obama needs to show “the scope of the problem in human terms (parents facing separation from their (American) kids) and also make clear how “his approach is well within the scope of his powers of prosecutorial discretion,” namely that it’s legal.  Finally, he needs to argue strongly that “he had no choice but to act, because the Republicans are only joking when they say they'd pass immigration reform if he didn’t do it.”
President Obama’s frustration with Republican inaction over immigration reform prompts a major address to the nation Thursday night.