Boehner Vows ‘Direct Challenge’ to Obama’s Amnesty Early Next Year, Won’t Reveal How

House Speaker John Boehner claims that next year Republicans will take the fight over executive amnesty to President Obama. 

“We’ve also made clear that early on we’ll make a direct challenge to the president’s unilateral actions on immigration,” the Ohio Republican told reporters Thursday in arguing the case for the House’s must-pass government spending bill. “You can expect that challenge to the president to include real action on border security.”

He noted that the House is already working on the matter, and will pick it back up in January. “We’ll take this fight to the president on the strongest possible ground — with new majorities that the American people elected,” he said. 

Boehner declined to list the ways the House could combat Obama’s actions next year, saying “it would be an inconclusive list.”

“There are options available to us and we are going to exercise those options. The president can’t continue to just ignore the Constitution,” he said. 

The House is slated to vote on a massive, $1 trillion-plus government funding bill Thursday afternoon. It funds most of the government through September 2015 — except for the Department of Homeland Security, which only receives funding into February to allow Republicans the opportunity to revisit the fight against Obama’s executive amnesty. 

Conservatives have expressed frustration that the bill does not defund the President’s executive actions but instead the delays the fight. Scores of conservatives are expected to vote against the measure for that reason. 

Nevertheless, Boehner said he expects the “responsible bill to keep the government running” to pass in a bipartisan way.

“We worked through this process in a bipartisan, bicameral way and I do expect it to pass. But listen, if we don’t get finished today, we’re going to be here until Christmas.”

The Ohio Republican stressed the last minute, massive bill is not the way he would prefer to get business accomplished.

“I want to do 12 appropriations bills. I want to do them one at a time. And I want to do them before October 1st. But when the Senate does nothing they put us in this box and here we are,” he said, raising his voice. 

Indeed, Boehner placed the blame for the process on the Democratic Senate’s shoulders.

“Unfortunately the Democrat majority in the Senate passed no appropriations measures,” he said. “None, zero, nada. And dozens of House-passed bills also met the same fate, sitting in the Senate gathering dust.”