Republicans in Washington, under the tutelage of House Speaker John Boehner, are planning a full-scale cave to President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, by aiming to fund Obama’s immigration action in full this week.
Boehner on Tuesday pitched colleagues on a plan that utilizes bills from the reliably conservative Reps. Ted Yoho (R-FL) and Tom Price (R-GA), but ultimately fully funds Obama’s executive amnesty until at least March–and then will likely do so at that point in time as well.
The government funding portion would keep most of the government open until September 2015 but would only supply monies to the Department of Homeland Security until March, Politico’s John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman note in a Tuesday piece.
Current government funding runs out on Dec. 11, so to avoid a government shutdown before Christmas, Congress has to do something soon. But conservative-movement leaders say the forthcoming plan from Boehner and the other members of GOP leadership (including Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise) using Yoho and Price is a phony, toothless battle.
“A House vote on the Yoho bill would be purely symbolic, since it has no chance of being brought up in the Senate,” Rosemary Jenks, NumbersUSA’s director of government relations, told Breitbart News. “Americans expect Congress to take effective action to stop Obama’s lawless amnesty, not only to protect their jobs and wages, but also to protect the Constitution of the United States. Defunding the amnesty is the only way to stop it.”
Daniel Horowitz, the senior editor of the Conservative Review, added that this plan is a “joke” and Boehner knows it.
“Leadership’s attempt to sugar-coat their failure to address Obama’s amnesty in the CROmnibus, is a toothless, stand-alone bill that will never force the issue, and they know it,” Horowitz said. “Any bill that does not condition the funding for the immigration agencies to a rider defunding Obama’s amnesty is a joke.”
Horowitz added that Boehner’s buddies including House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) have misrepresented this issue to conservatives throughout this process, so no Republican House members should trust him now. Rogers specifically attempted to tell Republicans in Congress–and the American people–that Congress can’t block funding for Obama’s executive amnesty using the appropriations process, something the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) thoroughly refuted last week.
Rogers is in serious trouble in his district in Kentucky, as Tea Party leaders are searching for a primary challenger to him as a result of all this. Breitbart News broke that story, then the New York Times highlighted it after a Breitbart News investigation into how Rogers’ campaign contributor defense contractor General Dynamics is likely to financially benefit from Obama’s executive amnesty. General Dynamics is in the running to get the federal government contract to print the work permits and other documents Obama wants to give to millions of illegal aliens under the executive amnesty order, and a top company official said the firm expects to print the documents should it get the contract at a facility in Rogers’ district in Corbin, Kentucky. Horowitz says:
First Boehner and his bootlickers tried to tell us they couldn’t defund Obama’s amnesty. Now, they are making it clear that they won’t defund it. In most aspects of life, there are cant’s and there are won’ts. When it comes to Republican leaders defunding amnesty, we are clearly dealing with the latter. Republicans should never fund any aspect of government with an Omnibus, aside from national security-related agencies. This is not just about immigration. Obama is planning to destroy our manufacturing base with administrative energy regulations. Should we cede our power of the purse on those issues for another 10 months?
Because CRS explicitly laid out how Congress can stop Obama’s executive amnesty by blocking its funding, Horowitz said that any member who votes for this Yoho-Price plan is “complicit” in Obama’s amnesty.
“Any conservative who falls for this ploy is just as complicit in Obama’s amnesty as John Boehner and leadership,” Horowitz said.
Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton agrees that any member who votes for Obama’s amnesty funding is complicit:
Any member of Congress who funds Obama’s lawlessness is complicit in it. Congress has a positive moral obligation to cut off funds for the president’s outlaw immigration policies. Anything short of a funding cut-off may make the Washington establishment happy but is an affront to voters who know better. Approving tax money for illegal amnesty and Obama’s abuse of power while saying you’re against it sounds like a Gruber talking point. That the idea of funding Obama’s amnesty is even being broached makes Republican fulminations against Obama’s unconstitutional actions seem like a joke. But voters won’t be amused.
Many other conservative leaders are furious that Boehner would go to the mat, as he is doing, to back up Obama’s amnesty with funding.
“Americans recognize a show-vote when they see it, and the Yoho bill does nothing more than say President Obama cannot do what he did last month, last year, and the year before,” Glyn Wright, the executive director of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, said in an email to Breitbart News. “President Obama is the most lawless president this country has ever seen, and he will continue to rule by executive fiat until Congress cuts off his funding.”
George Rasley, the editor of Richard Viguerie’s ConservativeHQ, told Breitbart News that this show vote smacks of what Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions and now former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor have tried to sneak past members on blocking Obamacare funding and on slipping amnesty into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Rasley and others like Horowitz in a post on Conservative Review have compared what Boehner is doing now to what disgraced Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber did to slip Obamacare into law.
“This is the same kind of phony meaningless vote that House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions and former Majority Leader Eric Cantor tried to pull earlier this year on defunding Obamacare and on amnesty,” Rasley said in an email. “You’d think after Cantor’s defeat House Republican leaders would get the message that Jonathan Gruber was wrong and that grassroots voters aren’t as dumb as Capitol Hill insiders think they are.”
In a statement in response to Obama’s executive amnesty announcement a couple weeks ago, incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that the House must lead to pass a bill that blocks funding for Obama’s executive amnesty:
The House should send the Senate a government funding bill which ensures no funds can be spent for this unlawful purpose. If [Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid’s Senate Democrats vote to surrender their own institution to an imperial dictate and block the measure, then the House should send a short-term funding measure so the new GOP majority can be sworn in and pass a funding bill with the needed language.
Others, such as Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Mike Crapo (R-ID), David Vitter (R-LA) and likely-soon-to-be Louisiana U.S. Senator-elect Bill Cassidy (should incumbent Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) lose as she is expected to), have backed Sessions’ plan. Tea Party grassroots warriors Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) all back the plan to block funding for Obama’s amnesty, too.
During a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley on which Breitbart News accompanied them the day after Obama’s amnesty announcement, Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Steve King (R-IA) called on the American people to light up the phone lines in Congress to stop the GOP establishment from passing something like the current GOP leadership Yoho-Price plan.
“Congressman King and I were very concerned for people across the United States about whether anyone was pushing back,” Bachmann told Breitbart News while looking across the Rio Grande river into Mexico. “So that’s why we’re meeting with the Border Patrol but also we want to let the American people know that yes we are pushing back but we can’t do it alone. We need them.”
Bachmann and King are leading a rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday at noon, and are asking Americans to pressure their members of Congress to block efforts like this to cave to Obama’s amnesty.
“It was profoundly powerful when the American people did it with Obamacare, and nothing scares politicians more than seeing the whites of their constituents’ eyes,” Bachmann said of the Dec. 3 rally on the U.S. Capitol steps and efforts to have people melt the phone lines. She adds:
We want real people to come in and demand of their U.S. senators and demand of their representatives: Are you going to vote to defund Obama’s illegal amnesty? We’re going to have a Wall of Fame and Wall of Shame on who’s going to vote which way. We’re asking people to melt the phone lines. It doesn’t do a lot of good to call now because Congress is virtually shut down for the next week. But from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12, that’s our window of opportunity. I really think we can put the pressure on Republicans to pass a bill to defund.
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