That's an interesting painting, and it's very telling how it's done. Obama is not portrayed as a Roman emperor, or as a king. He's portrayed as Napoleon, and there's a very interesting parallel between Napoleon and Obama (there is very much they do not have in common, but one thing they do have in common is this): crazy, right-wing nuts wrongly regard them as the face of the revolution for basically doing things that are not only not revolutionary at all, but that those very right-wingers themselves have been doing forever. And this is the case with immigration reform. Executive action on immigration is far from new. It was undertaken by a wide variety of different presidents, with the most analogous to the present situation being George H.W. Bush.

Let me break down the separation of powers: the chief executive is an elected official, and as such has discretion over how to execute legislation, and that inherently includes the power to refrain from executing some legislation. If it did not include that power, there would be very little reason to vote for the chief executive at all, since that person would only be the servant of the legislature. And the historical precedent for executive orders is overwhelming. It's as old as the country, and all executive orders are simply an exercise of the president's discretion of how or whether to execute a given legislative mandate.

Nothing in the immigration reform, from allocating more budget resources to border control, to refusing to seek deportation against certain persons when there are active people who could otherwise be deported under the legislative scheme of modern immigration law, steps outside of the core decisions of how to follow the legislative scheme. It doesn't take affirmative legislative action by any standard. It is squarely within the authority of the president.

Nor is it particularly revolutionary, and I say this as someone who wishes it was revolutionary. To state my own ideology, I am an anarchist who believes there should be no such thing as borders. I wish deeply that this was a revolutionary act, but it is not. It is a mild reform well within the president's authority.