Anti-amnesty champion Steve King is not optimistic about Republican leadership’s plan to defund President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform, even as Republicans prepare for a fight on the issue in February.
“It won’t be the president that’s likely to cave,” King said in an interview with Breitbart News.
King says that Republicans missed an opportunity to fight right after Obama made his announcement in November to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
He signalled disappointment that there wasn’t an “immediate and visceral reaction” by leadership to oppose Obama on the issue.
King said that he and his congressional allies who opposed Obama’s action and wanted to fight were “suppressed” as a result of the budget deal at the end of the year.
“The resistance to that has been suppressed by the strategic maneuvering of Republican leadership, and you know they’ve willingly funded the president’s lawlessness,” he said.
King dismissed the amnesty fight by Speaker Boehner which may happen in February, after the continuing funding resolution for the Department of Homeland security would expire.
Even if Obama vetoed the bill, effectively shutting down the Department of Homeland Security, King predicted that Obama would continue to sustain the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services so-called “legalization” while failing to fund the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“All the while the president can look at us, inwardly or outwardly, and say ‘I outfoxed you,’” King said.
King cited Republican leadership’s handling of the government shutdown of Obamacare as funding moved forward.
The only hope for him, he explained, was for grassroots activists to demand more of a fight from their leaders.
“If the American people will rise up, Congress will act, and if they don’t rise up I can tell you, I think I know all this well enough to tell you how it’s going to end. Barack Obama gets what he wants and others posture that they tried,” he said.
During an end of the year interview with National Public Radio, Obama cited King as a Republican who believed that immigrants were bad for the country.
“If your view is that immigrants are either fundamentally bad to the country or that we actually have the option of deporting 11 million immigrants, regardless of the disruptions, regardless of the cost, and that that is who we are as Americans, I reject that,” he said, after saying that he and King did not agree on immigration reform.
King said that Obama and amnesty proponents were merely “assigning a belief system” on him that wasn’t accurate. In return, he questioned the president.
“How do you defend yourself when you gave an oath to uphold the constitution to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and you’ve torn Article I of the Constitution out and impudently folded it up and smugly put it into your shirt pocket?” he asked.