President Obama may have denounced the very executive action on immigration he ended up taking more than 20 times in his presidency, but that’s not stopping him from ardently defending his actions.
Obama appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and host George Stephanopoulos grilled the president about his the contradictions in his words and actions.
“You have done more than you used to think you can do. You know several times over the last couple of years you were asked can you do more and you said nope, I am out of administrative flexibility, what changed?” Stephanopoulos asked.
Obama at first denied this charge.
“Well, that’s not true, if you look George, I often times was asked: ‘Can you just halt deportations?’ And I said, ‘No I can’t do that,'” he replied.
Stephanopoulos then directly quoted Obama’s “emperor” line that has been making the rounds this week.
“On a Google Hangout, you were asked specifically, “‘What can you do to prevent families from being broken apart’ and you said, ‘I’m not an emperor, I am out of administrative flexibility,'” the host said.
“George, what is absolutely true is that we couldn’t solve the entire problem and still can’t solve the entire problem. But what we can do is to prioritize felons, criminals, recent arrivals, folks who are coming right at the border, and acknowledge that if somebody’s been here for over five years, they may have an American child or a legal permanent resident child, it doesn’t make sense for us to prioritize them when we know that we need more resources…” Obama said before Stephanopoulos jumped in again.
“But do you have the right to make that decision on your own?” he asked.
The two then went back and forth on past precedent, with Stephanopoulos pointing out that when other presidents took action on immigration it was backed up and supported by a majority in Congress.
He then compared it to taking action on issues beyond immigration.
“How do you respond to the argument, a future president comes in, wants lower taxes. Doesn’t happen. Congress won’t do it – he says I’m not going to prosecute those who don’t pay capital gains tax,” he asked.
“Well, the truth of the matter is, George, that the reason that we have to do prosecutorial discretion in immigration is that we know we are not even close to being able to deal with the folks who have been here a long time. The vast majority of folks understand that they need to pay taxes, and when we conduct an audit, for example, we are selecting those folks who are most likely to be cheating,” Obama responded. “We’re not going after millions and millions of people who everybody knows are here and were taking advantage of low wages as they’re mowing lawns or cleaning out bedpans, and looking the other way – but then you got politicians suddenly going out there saying, suggesting somehow that we should be deporting all of them. Everybody knows, including Republicans, that we’re not going to deport 11 million people.”
“So you don’t think it’d be legitimate for a future president to make that argument?” Stephanopoulos questioned again.
“With respect to taxes? Absolutely not. But what is true – what is true today is we don’t audit every single person, but we still expect that people are going to go ahead and follow the law,” the president said. “And we have limited resources, we have to make sure that we prioritize those folks who are most dangerous and we should acknowledge what everybody has already acknowledged through their actions – and Congress acknowledges through their budget – which is we’re not in the business of deporting millions of people or breaking up families.”
Watch the interview below:
