While the 2016 presidential contest is starting to consume the attention of the political world, another immediate concern for the Republican Party ought to be what the party will stand for in the coming post-Obama era. The pomp and circumstance surrounding this week's State of the Union address notwithstanding, President Obama becomes a little less relevant to American politics every day. To track how the president's importance is shifting, it is useful to separate every action he and his administration take into three categories: the meaningful, the meaningless, and the vaguely interesting. Right now, many executive orders and other actions involving executive authority, such as the president's recent moves on immigration and opening up relations with Cuba—whether you agree with them or not—are still meaningful; proposals to Congress that have precisely no chance of being enacted into law, however, are not; and much of what falls in between qualifies at most for the third category. Obama's progress toward irrelevancy will begin to accelerate rapidly this fall, with the onset of presidential nomination debates, when the campaign becomes more of a

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