Some House leaders, eager to avoid a politically dangerous fight over the passage of an essential government funding bill, appear ready to take the “power of the purse” off the table when it comes to legislative action aimed at blocking President Obama’s pending changes to deportation policy.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers said Thursday that Obama’s executive action, which would legalize up to 5 million people, would be administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency funded entirely by fees, not Congress.
“We have no authority, right now, to defund CIS, because we don’t have authority over fees,” an spokeswoman for Rogers said Thursday.
Rogers is writing legislation that would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year without taking aim at Obama’s contentious move on immigration. The legislation will be ready for the House to debate the week of Dec. 8, ahead of the Dec. 11 expiration of a stopgap funding measure, aids said.
Rogers’ proposal has not been publicly endorsed by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, or other top leaders, but appropriators point out that Boehner has not directed Rogers to change course.
The move makes sense for GOP leaders in both the House and the Senate, where Republicans are about to take the majority from the Democrats in the new Congress.
Republicans in both chambers are eager to show they can govern without the calamity that ensued in October 2013, when a conservative-led effort to defund the healthcare law caused congressional gridlock and a 16-day government shutdown the public largely blamed on the GOP.
Rogers is eager to usher a long-term spending bill through the House, in part because it would remove the threat of a 2015 spending fight for his longtime friend and fellow Kentuckian, Mitch McConnell, who is about to become Senate majority leader.
But Boehner has yet to publicly endorse the Rogers plan, leaving open the possibility that the House will try to include something in the spending legislation that addresses Obama’s move on immigration.
Republican leaders are waiting to hear not only the details of Obama’s proposal, which he’ll announce at 8 p.m., but also the reaction from the GOP conference and the public, GOP leadership aides tell the Washington Examiner.
If the House moves ahead with the Rogers plan, the legislation would likely have to pass with significant support from Democrats.
A large faction of Republicans say they won’t support a long-term bill that doesn’t try to defund Obama’s immigration move, and they aren’t buying the explanation from Rogers that the House purse strings do not reach far enough to stop the executive action.
“We can write what we want to write into an appropriation bill, into a must-pass piece of legislation,” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, argued outside the House chamber on Thursday. “We could write language that would say ‘no funds appropriated in this legislation can be used to carry out, and no fees generated by any agency, shall be used to fund the president’s unconstitutional edict.’ ”
But Rogers said the rules don’t permit the kind of provision King and others want to include.
“To alter or change the fee matter would take a change of the law, an authorization to change the immigration act that sets up the fee structure,” Rogers told the Examiner.
