Tonight at 5 pm Seattle time, President Obama will announce his plan to fix "our broken immigration system" through executive orders. (I'll be live-blogging the speech right here on Slog.) But Texas Senator Ted Cruz has already formed his opinion on the matter. Shockingly, he's against it. In fact, the headline of his Politico article is "Obama Is Not a Monarch."

Cruz's argument begins with an outright falsehood: "The [midterm] elections were a referendum on amnesty, and the voters soundly rejected it. There was no ambiguity." I don't understand how Cruz can even make that argument. Maybe inside his wacko right-wing Texas bubble, he heard a lot of chatter about immigration, and maybe the disproportionately old white wealthy Americans who showed up at the polls for the midterms cared about immigration, but the two-thirds of America who didn't bother to vote makes the phrase "no ambiguity" a very arguable one.

And so Cruz amps up the scary language in a concertina for dog whistles. "Undeterred, President Obama appears to be going forward," he warns us. "It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people." Cruz surely couldn't be warning Politico's old white audience that President Obama is an...angry black man, could he?

Cruz continues, "If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch." This is bold stuff. And it ignores the fact that, as Bill Clinton pointed out on Wednesday, "...every president in the modern era has issued some executive action on immigration, so I imagine he'll be on pretty firm legal ground." And yes, that includes Reagan and both Bushes.

Cruz warns Obama will "threaten a shutdown"—bold talk, coming from the guy who almost single-handedly shut down the government last year—and then he concludes his piece with a threat: the American people, Cruz says, "have elected a new Congress full of members who have promised in their campaigns to stand up to this lawless President and stop the amnesty. We must honor our commitments. If the president will not respect the people, Congress must."

Like the rest of Cruz's piece, it's just hot air and bluster, a screed tossed out to score easy political points with the racist base. But as a very vague threat, it's really kind of breathtaking. Is he threatening a shutdown? Impeachment? Outside of big talk, what power does Ted Cruz really have?