Republicans pushed back on a White House line that they are jeopardizing national security by using Homeland Security funding to try to undo President Obama’s executive action on immigration.
After a Friday GOP conference meeting focused on a new plan to defund the executive action, a key player in the effort brushed aside the White House accusations as predictable politics and blasted Obama for playing politics with the terrorist attack in Paris.
“The White House doesn’t like what we’re doing — there’s a stunner,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., told the Washington Examiner. “They’re going to demagogue this — why not take advantage of a terrorist act overseas to promote your policies back home?
“I know what my folks back home want and that’s to fix the president’s executive amnesty, so we’re going to to do that,” he continued. “Would the president demagogue it? Yes. If Paris hand’t happened, would he be attacking us as anti-Hispanic? Yes. Is there any basis in fact in either of those issues? No.”
Republicans in December passed an omnibus spending package that funded the government until September except the Homeland Security Department, the umbrella agency that oversees the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs and Border Patrol agency.
Instead, they funded the DHS only until the end of February so they could focus on trying to target the funds used to handle Obama’s new legal relief for an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants who have been in the country for years.
The House GOP’s efforts to undo Obama’s executive action is viewed as an opening salvo in the fight. The defunding element likely will be considered as an amendment to a bill funding the department of Homeland Security for the rest of the year, Mulvaney said. The amendment also would take aim at the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals Program.
Obama created the DACA program through another executive action in 2012. It gives legal status to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
Such a broad bill aimed at unraveling Obama’s executive action has little chance of passing in the Senate, worrying some appropriators that the DHS funding bill could get caught in a cross-chamber fight and end up jeopardizing DHS funding after February.
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said the White House argument is a red herring because Republicans wouldn’t do anything to prevent money from flowing to DHS agencies vital to national security.
“We’ll fully fund the national security elements of DHS — there’s no question about that,” he said. “In fact, we’ve generally been in the lead, on the forefront, in moving forward on all the practices that give us better security and the programs to fund it.”
“So I don’t think that argument washes very well,” he added.
As chairman of the Republicans’ re-election efforts, Walden said he traveled the country over the last election cycle and heard a clear message from voters that they believe Obama crossed the line when he issued the executive action on immigration.
“The president has ignored the law and the Constitution and violated both in our view,” he said.
