Immigration tests GOP governors considering 2016 bids

For a handful of Republican governors mulling 2016 White House runs, President Obama's immigration announcement is offering them their first real test of the next election cycle.

On Friday, the president signed an executive order to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. That decision presents potential GOP contenders with a complicated situation, in which they have to balance their outrage at Obama without diminishing their ability to preach to voters that they are above the Washington dysfunction.

They also face the conundrum of trying to court the party's most conservative voters, while looking forward to the general election. Whoever is the GOP nominee will need to make huge strides with Latino voters for the Republican Party to win the White House.

On one end of the Republican presidential spectrum, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush have combined their condemnation of Obama for acting unilaterally with a call for Washington Republicans to get a larger deal on immigration done.

Kasich, who served 18 years in the U.S. House and scored a landslide victory in a swing state, suggested this week that congressional Republicans look to how the Republicans dealt with Bill Clinton in the final years of his presidency.

"The Republicans have to say, 'We're not going to play politics, we'll get together with you and we'll try to figure something out,' " Kasich said in a Fox News interview. "It's sort of what we did in 1997 after going through shutdowns when we worked with Clinton to balance the budget."

Peri Arnold, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, said Kasich is positioning himself as a Washington establishment alternative to Bush, perhaps the strongest proponent of comprehensive immigration reform in the Republican field.

"Action must come in the form of bipartisan comprehensive reform passed through Congress," Bush said. "It is time for Republican leaders in Congress to act. We must demonstrate to Americans we are the party that will tackle serious challenges and build broad-based consensus to achieve meaningful reforms for our citizens and our future."

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has carefully staked out a position that may appeal to conservative primary voters. In the lead-up to Obama's announcement, he was among several governors to say they were pondering legal action.

Walker, who recently won a second term in blue state Wisconsin and bolstered his reputation by surviving a 2012 recall vote, said on Friday that Obama has gone from "the audacity of hope to the audacity of the power play." He also cast the executive action by Obama as bad for middle-class workers.

"You're going to see a whole wave of people trying to come into America now, and that will affect people's jobs, it will affect middle-class workers, it will affect the unemployment rate in this country," Walker said on the Laura Ingraham show.

Similarly, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have raised the idea of filing a lawsuit to stop Obama.

Pence, who previously served in the U.S. House, faced a backlash from his Republican colleagues when he tried to offer compromise immigration legislation in 2006. This time around, "Pence looks like a guy who is just thinking about the Republican primaries," said Arnold, the Notre Dame political scientist.

Perry, who supported legislation in his home state that granted undocumented immigrants in-state college tuition, knows well from his own unsuccessful 2012 run for the White House that immigration can prove to be a difficult issue with the party's conservative base.

In one of the more memorable moments of the 2012 Republican primary cycle, Perry was booed by the audience when he said "I don't think you have a heart" in response to criticism of the Texas bill from Republican opponents Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

Arnold said that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has resisted drawing out his position on immigration until he decides whether he will make a 2016 run, has taken perhaps the most curious stance among the Republican field.

"Christie seems to be, for a man who is extraordinarily rambunctious, enormously cautious about every step to the point of seeming vanilla-flavored and too uncommitted," Arnold said.