House Republicans are scheduling a vote in the next few weeks that would clear the way for lawmakers to file a brief in the Supreme Court case that will decide whether President Obama overstepped his authority with his 2014 executive action on immigration.
Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the House will vote on a resolution allowing the House to file the brief in the United States v. State of Texas case. With a big majority of Republicans, the resolution is all but guaranteed to pass.
“This is a very extraordinary step,” Ryan said Tuesday after meeting with GOP lawmakers in the Capitol basement. “In fact, it has never been done before. But this executive amnesty is a direct attack on the Congress’s Article I powers under our Constitution. The president is not permitted to write law. Only Congress is.”
“The House will make that very, very clear, and we will do so as an institution on behalf of the American people, on behalf of representative self-government,” he added. “Executive amnesty is a direct attack on Congress’s Article 1 powers in the Constitution.”
Ryan said the House will file the brief “as an institution on behalf of self government.” The vote, he said, would take place “in the coming weeks.”
Texas and two dozen other states are challenging Obama’s deferred deportation program, arguing that the president exceeded his constitutional authority in 2014 when he moved to defer deportation to an expanded group of illegal immigrants, and allow them to work in the United States.
