President Obama would veto any legislation aimed at unraveling his executive action on immigration even if it means shutting down the government, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.
Earnest predicted Obama would use his veto pen to reject any measure taking aim at his action providing relief for more than 4 million illegal immigrants, but cautioned that he didn’t believe Republicans would craft a bill in such a way that it would lead to a government shutdown if he refused to sign it into law.
“I actually don’t believe that members of Congress are going to be willing to go along with an effort to shut down the government over the president’s executive action on immigration,” Earnest told reporters during his daily briefing.
House Republicans are planning to target the president’s executive action on immigration through the appropriations process, as early as this week. One strategy gaining traction among conservatives in the GOP conference is to pass a massive spending bill that funds all of the federal government except the Department of Homeland Security, which handles immigration.
Earnest didn’t indicate whether Obama would veto such a measure but stressed that the administration believes that Congress should fund the entire government through the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
“There are a variety of proposals that we’ve seen being floated on Capitol Hill,” he said. “It’s the view of the administration that Congress should fulfill its responsibility and pass a year-long budget.”
“We’re not asking them to do anything heroic here,” he continued. “We’re asking them to do their job.”
Funding the federal government through September, he argued, would help lock in some economic certainty for businesses and help boost the domestic economy in a time of global uncertainty.
