This is the kind of tactic we often see the Left do. And that we very rarely see conservatives even contemplate. It’s why the battle between the two sides consists of conservatives playing checkers while their opponents play chess. 

The Left has a deep toolbox of procedural tactics that it’s always expanding. It benefits from a huge network with lots of allies and the knowledge that it can go outside, around, and through the law with little to no consequences. But even so there’s a huge failure of strategic imagination in conservative politics.

So it’s good to see governors like DeSantis and Abbott actually showing what you can do when you start working the system, instead of whining about how the system is unfair.

Escalating his showdown with President Joe Biden, Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday ordered state child-care regulators to yank licenses from facilities that house minors who crossed the state’s southern border without papers and were detained.

Currently, 52 state-licensed general residential operations and child placing agencies in Texas have contracts with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to care for undocumented immigrant children. ORR contracts with about 200 facilities in 22 states.

Within three months or so, Abbott’s move apparently would force them to stop serving unaccompanied minors because the facilities must have state licenses to qualify for the federal contracts.

Is this a kill shot? No. 

The Democrats have plenty of judges and experts who will find a way through, over, or around it. But they’ll have to do that, which puts them on the defensive.

And that, frankly, rarely happens in the battle between the two sides. 

Lefties assail Republican administration with total warfare attacks coming from all directions, overwhelming them with lawsuits, investigations, scandals, and countless procedural obstacles, leaks, and acts of internal sabotage. 

This is the kind of clever procedural sabotage that Team Open Borders will recover from, but that’s the whole point. Part of the game is keeping the other side on the defensive, getting them into a reactive mode, which lefties do very well to Republicans. Do this often enough and you stretch their resources thin and divert their focus. This is what the Left did very well to the Trump administration.

Now the Biden administration is getting a small taste of the same medicine.