Senator Jeff Sessions says he’s not convinced his fellow Republicans have a plan to successfully combat President Obama’s newly announced executive orders on immigration.
“I haven’t seen the details of a plan to confront this unprecedented power grab,” Sessions said in a phone interview Thursday evening. He added that while plenty of his Republican colleagues have released “tough” statements following Obama’s announcement, he hasn’t seen the party coalesce around a plan.
As for his own views, the Alabama senator tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that there is plenty of precedent, as well as constitutional authority, for Congress to block the funding of executive orders. He acknowledged that a legal challenge would be “reasonable” though difficult given the courts’ recent history of staying out of disputes between the executive and legislative branches. The strategy he preferred would be to fight the president’s action by stopping its funds.
“The simplest and the greatest power of Congress is the power of the purse,” Sessions said. He cited the Boland amendments of the 1980’s, which passed Congress and restricted President Ronald Reagan’s administration to provide monetary aid to the Contras of Nicaragua, and the more recent efforts by Congress to block funds for closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
But the debate among congressional Republicans over how to address the executive order still continues. Sessions and his allies have argued Congress should pass a short-term funding bill before the current government funding runs out on December 11, which would allow a united Republican House and Senate to block the funding for the order’s provisions in 2015. But House appropriations chairman Hal Rogers has pushed back forcefully on this idea, and his committee released a statement Thursday morning that the president’s actions could not be blocked this way.
“Congress does not appropriate funds for any of its operations, including the issuance of immigration status or work permits, with the exception of the ‘E-Verify’ program,” read the statement. “Therefore, the appropriations process cannot be used to “defund” the agency. The agency has the ability to continue to collect and use fees to continue current operations, and to expand operations as under a new executive order, without needing legislative approval by the Appropriations Committee or the Congress, even under a continuing resolution or a government shutdown.”
Sessions himself pushed back on this in another statement, saying the notion is “just plain wrong.”
The American people’s Congress has the power and every right to deny funding for unworthy activities. It is a routine and constitutional application of congressional power,” Sessions said. “There is no question that Congress has the power to block this expenditure and no doubt that it can be done. If such language is not included, the measure will be subject to the same 60-vote threshold in the Senate and simple majority in the House. This will require no more votes than passing a funding bill without the needed language.”
