Yuval Levin explains for National Review Online readers why he’s been disappointed by Republican leaders’ actions so far during the “lame-duck” session of Congress.

Republican leaders have, as always, faced the challenge of steering a course between doing harm to conservative causes through hyperactivity and doing harm to those causes through under-activity — between insisting at all costs on more than is possible and settling with no struggle for less than is doable. That middle ground is essential because the two extremes are almost equally dangerous, and in similar and often inter-related ways. The government shutdown that happened last year, for instance, was at least as much a function of leadership passivity as of membership hyperactivity. To make real progress toward advancing a conservative vision of government, Republicans will need to find a workable balance between them.

This month, the challenge Republicans have faced on this front was shaped in large part by the president’s decision to unilaterally exempt from legal jeopardy about half the illegal immigrants present in America and to provide them with work permits and related benefits. This constitutional provocation requires a response from Congress (rather than simply a reliance on the courts) but Congress also needs to keep the government funded past the December 11 expiration of the last funding measure. It hardly makes sense to force an all-out budget showdown at this point, while Democrats are far more powerful than they will be just a few weeks from now. So Republicans need to express their opposition to the president’s action and to pass some kind of budget measure, and in a way that reinforces rather than undermines their substantive agenda, their appeal to the public, and their internal cohesion going into next year.

All of that adds up to no easy feat. But in attempting it, congressional leaders have leaned far too much in the direction of passivity and missed a key opportunity to both better unify Republicans and make an important point.

It’s true the Congress can’t actually compel the president to reverse his order at this point. But the struggle for constitutional balance is an ongoing effort, and the absence of an opportunity for a decisive victory is not an excuse for shirking the obligation to exert what pressure is reasonably possible.