Give Barack Obama credit for keeping his promise. “This is going to be a year of action,” the president pledged last January. And indeed, with a series of unilateral executive actions in the last few months of the year, he made it so.

Now, as a new year arrives, the job for the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill is to keep Obama in check as he strives to bypass lawmakers and make 2015 another year of (unilateral) action.