The phone lines are jammed.
The American people have risen up in response to a rallying cry from Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), overloading the phone lines on Capitol Hill to pressure their members of Congress to fight against President Obama’s planned executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.
“I was on hold with the Capitol Hill switchboard about a minute or so each time I called my Representative and my two Senators,” Catharine Trauernicht, a Tea Party activist in Virginia, told Breitbart News Monday. “Typically, my calls are answered right away, but I always know that citizens have sprung into action when the switchboard recording comes on and says, ‘All of our operators are assisting other callers at this time.'”
When called by Breitbart News Monday at about 1:30 p.m., the Capitol Hill switchboard line was similarly busy.
“This shows the American people are going to resist,” a Sessions aide told Breitbart News. “The crescendo will grow. They are only beginning to be heard. They will get louder in the coming days.”
The calls are coming in response to Sen. Sessions, who last week asked the American people to rise up and pressure their elected leaders to stop the president from moving forward with any new executive amnesty. Obama has already granted executive amnesty to upwards of 800,000 illegal aliens through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program which was initiated in 2012, and this year Obama is threatening to expand DACA to five to six million illegal aliens.
“The American people have begged and pleaded for years for our laws to be enforced,” Sessions said in his statement calling for the American people to rise up. “We have people in our own country living in violence, fear and poverty every single day. They have demanded an immigration policy that puts their jobs, wages and communities first. Every citizen should pick up the phone and ask of their congressional representative: where do you stand?”
The deluge comes after Sessions’s call to melt the phone lines was reported and picked up by the Drudge Report over the weekend.
Sessions specifically has called on lawmakers to back legislative efforts by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Cruz and Blackburn have offered Senate and House companion bills that Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has called on all members of Congress to back, and if they won’t Sessions says they are “complicit in the nullification of our laws and basically the nullification of border enforcement.”
Cruz and Blackburn have introduced legislation in the Senate and House respectively that would block President Obama’s administration from expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that administratively granted amnesty to upwards of 800,000 illegal aliens who say they arrived in America as minors. Their bill would bar funding of the documents the administration needs to produce to carry out such an order.
Their argument is that the current border crisis–in which about 60,000 illegal alien minors are being sheltered in U.S. facilities around the country–is a direct result of the promise of amnesty the illegal aliens expect they will get if they get inside America’s borders successfully.
After Sessions’s call for citizen action, Cruz joined leaders from the grassroots group Tea Party Patriots to echo the call during an organizing conference call Sunday evening. Cruz called on Tea Partiers nationwide to back the Sessions plan to ask citizens to call their lawmakers.
Tea Party Patriots has, on its Facebook page Monday, published a 1-800 number that directs callers to the Capitol Hill switchboard.
“Call Congress NOW,” Tea Party Patriots posted, “and tell your Representative not to give Obama a dime to solve his border failures until Congress stops funding Obama’s executive amnesty!” Tea Party Patriots posted on its Facebook page.
NumbersUSA, a grassroots group against amnesty, similarly directed two million of its three million members to call Congress Monday morning. The group, like Tea Party Patriots, made a 1-800 number for its members to call.
On Monday morning, Sandy Rios the host of Sandy Rios in the Morning on American Family Radio talk–a show syndicated across 150 stations to five million listeners nationwide–backed the Sessions call, pushing Americans to call their members of Congress.
“Bankrupting your country, undermining its health and security is not a Christian virtue,” Rios told Breitbart News. “In spite of Bible verses taken out of context by misguided members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, the Bible is clear that people are responsible first to take care of their own.”