Congressman Ted Yoho (R-FL), the sponsor of a bill that asserts President Obama does not have the legal authority to implement his executive action on immigration, dodged on whether House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) would fight to defund the president’s executive order on immigration in March during an interview on Wednesday’s “Laura Ingraham Show.”

Towards the end of the interview, the discussion turned to whether Boehner would defund the president’s executive order in March after the stopgap funding for DHS that is currently being pushed by Republicans expired, Yoho said “it’s not a matter of trust,” when asked why he had faith that Boehner would battle to defund the executive action when Yoho himself has been critical of Boehner in the past. 

He then was asked whether he believed Bohener would fight the funding for the executive order, to which Yoho responded “it’s going to be a new Congress, come first of the year, and there’s a lot of people that came up here on idealistic principles that we’re going to stand firm.” And “we look forward to the ensuing fight to do what’s right for this country.”

Earlier, Yoho said that HR 5759, which he sponsored, “stops the process that he’s [Obama] trying to do, he’s re-writing the law and he does not have the authority to do that.” 

When pressed on the fact that the bill does not attack the funding for the president’s executive action on immigration, Yoho said that the funding with be handled with a CR/omnibus hybrid that his bill “takes away his [Obama’s] legal authority,” although he did not say how Congress could remove the president’s legal authority without the intervention of the courts.

When asked “has he [Boehner] pledged that he will replace this bill with the Sessions bill?” He responded, “we haven’t gone that far,” and argued that DHS was “self-funding through the fees and things like that they collect. And that we cannot shut that off until we get into the appropriations process and re-write those bills, and that’s where we have to go.”


Yoho also said that he didn’t know if Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) would support his bill, although he had “seen” that Reid pledged support for it, but seemed to doubt Reid’s sincerity. 


Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett