Republicans launch bid to short-circuit Obama executive action on illegal immigrants

House Republicans, already locked in an 11th-hour battle with Senate Democrats over border security funding, are making a last-ditch effort to prevent President Obama from wielding his executive pen to let millions more illegal immigrants stay in the country. 

The House plans to vote on a bill Thursday afternoon that would prohibit Obama from expanding a policy that lets some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children stay. Amid reports that the administration is considering such an expansion, the bill by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., would specifically bar the president from broadening the 2012 policy. 

The vote was scheduled by Republican leaders as part of an effort to win conservative support for a separate, scaled-down package giving the Department of Homeland Security an immediate $659 million to address the border crisis and making other policy changes. 

Both the funding bill and the executive action bill face dim chances in the Senate. But the latter reflects heightened concerns in the Republican caucus that the president will take unilateral action either during the August recess or shortly afterward to ease deportations ...