LITTLE FINGER'S SMALL WALL:

The reason so many Republicans are opposed to Trump's move here is that the wall is small ball. If you're going to trample on Congress and put political and legal capital on the line for a fight that goes to the Supreme Court, at least make it a battle that's worth the cost. No one really believes a few more miles of the wall -- for which Trump will raid Department of Defense coffers -- will do much to halt drug or human traffickers. The spending bill Trump signed to avoid another damaging shutdown, in fact, includes far more money for border security, with high-tech monitoring technologies that would likely provide a much more cost-effective way to secure the 2,000-mile barrier with Mexico.

Trump considers his Game of Thrones solution (Spoiler: It didn't work in Westeros either) a political imperative -- a way of showing the base he's fighting for tough immigration policy. Even if held up in court, he's doing everything he can to fulfill a central campaign promise. In a typically entertaining zigzagging Rose Garden appearance on Friday, Trump declared that he didn't really need the emergency order, but "I just want to get it done much faster."

So then why not go big? Declare a national emergency to change the asylum rules, or end family reunification (aka "chain migration"), or change the system to favor high-skilled immigrants. Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- still in legal limbo nearly seven years later -- accomplished a policy goal to remove the threat of deportation for hundreds of thousands of people, in a wild executive overreach of Congress that proved to be an effective election-year play for the Latino vote. But Obama wasn't fiddling with appropriations accounts.

Republicans' chief concern right now? That the next Democratic president will use the Trump precedent to declare a national emergency on gun control -- there was another mass shooting in Illinois on Friday -- or climate change and sidestep Congress to enact the liberal policies she or he wants.

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