Matthew Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon, offers Congress a path for fighting against President Obama’s plans to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants through executive order:
How to fight him? Begin with the lame-duck session of Congress. The GOP cannot allow Harry Reid to pass a continuing resolution that funds the government through the rest of the fiscal year, thereby depriving Republicans of the opportunity to address executive amnesty using its departmental budgets.
“Using the normal appropriations process, with bills the House has already drafted,” write the editors of National Review, the Republican Congress “can attach riders regarding, say, prosecution of illegal immigrants to Homeland Security funding, or power-plant regulations to EPA funding.”
Such riders are the best weapons Republicans have to delay and undermine harmful and constitutionally dubious policies such as executive amnesty. To unilaterally disarm would be worse than stupid. It would be a betrayal.
“Using the normal appropriations process, with bills the House has already drafted,” write the editors of National Review, the Republican Congress “can attach riders regarding, say, prosecution of illegal immigrants to Homeland Security funding, or power-plant regulations to EPA funding.”
Such riders are the best weapons Republicans have to delay and undermine harmful and constitutionally dubious policies such as executive amnesty. To unilaterally disarm would be worse than stupid. It would be a betrayal.
Read the whole thing here.
Republican leaders in Congress aren’t set on a plan:
The problem is that any funding bill would need a supermajority (i.e., Democratic support) in the Senate and Obama’s signature—the former is possible but difficult, and the latter is virtually impossible. And it’d be a tall order to override a presidential veto.
Republican leaders in both houses are terrified of a repeat of their “defund Obamacare” fight in October 2013. Immigration hawks point out an important difference: Ted Cruz and his conservative allies in the Obamacare fight were trying to defund an existing law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. Blocking an executive action on immigration, they argue, is simply Congress using its constitutional power of the purse.
Senior House GOP aides believe there’s no way to win a funding fight, no matter how it’s framed, though they say the idea’s not completely off the table. It all depends on where the House conference is on the issue.
Republican leaders in both houses are terrified of a repeat of their “defund Obamacare” fight in October 2013. Immigration hawks point out an important difference: Ted Cruz and his conservative allies in the Obamacare fight were trying to defund an existing law, passed by Congress and signed by the president. Blocking an executive action on immigration, they argue, is simply Congress using its constitutional power of the purse.
Senior House GOP aides believe there’s no way to win a funding fight, no matter how it’s framed, though they say the idea’s not completely off the table. It all depends on where the House conference is on the issue.
