Obama Approval Rating At 50 Percent As Republicans Abandon Immigration Campaign Promises

President Barack Obama’s approval rating is as high as it’s been since mid-2013, reaching 50 percent on Monday according to Gallup.

“Less than a week after President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address to Congress, his job approval rating reached 50% in Gallup Daily tracking conducted Friday through Sunday,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad wrote on Monday. “This is the first time the president’s rating has returned to that level in Gallup’s ongoing three-day rolling averages since June 2013.”

This comes as Republicans have backed down from several immigration campaign promises as they seek to “govern” rather than follow through on what they said they were going to do.

Republicans, in late 2014 in the lame duck session of Congress, passed a 1,774-page, $1.1 trillion “cromnibus” spending bill that funded Obama’s executive amnesty—despite prior campaign trail promises from almost every Republican candidate and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus that Republicans would block funding for it. Not one member of Congress had time to read the text of the cromnibus bill before voting for it.

It wasn’t until the new Congress was seated in early 2015—and after a nearly successful coup attempt against Speaker John Boehner by 25 Republicans in his conference—that the House passed a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill that blocks funding for Obama’s executive amnesty.

The cromnibus debate handed GOP leverage to Obama and then outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — Boehner relied on Democrat votes to pass it. Still, the House-passed the DHS funding bill could block funding for Obama’s executive amnesty—if the Senate passes it and Republicans could convince Obama to sign it despite his veto threat. Senate Republicans say they will “try” to pass the House-passed bill, but they need to convince at least six Democrats to support it to get past cloture since there are only 54 Republicans in the new GOP-controlled Senate.

In response to Obama’s State of the Union speech last week, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) didn’t mention Obama’s executive amnesty at all. She seems to have since learned that she made a mistake in doing that as she hammered the president’s executive amnesty on stage at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines this weekend, but the other official Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union—from pro-amnesty freshman Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), in Spanish—actually talked about support for amnesty.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee is moving forward with the nomination of Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States, despite a campaign promise from now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that Republicans wouldn’t support her nomination if she supported Obama’s executive amnesty.

A hearing on Wednesday and Thursday of this week will feature Lynch on her own panel and other high-profile witnesses including liberal law professor Jonathan Turley, True The Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson on another. With Turley—who opposes Obama’s executive amnesty—testifying, however, Republicans may end up upholding McConnell’s campaign pledge after all if Lynch doesn’t testify against Obama’s executive amnesty, but that remains to be seen.

Newly seated Senate Immigration Subcommittee chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Breitbart News that Obama’s improving numbers show that Republicans need to understand they must stand up for American workers instead of special interests and foreign workers in the immigration debate.

“The economy is not performing well,” Sessions said in an emailed statement to Breitbart News.

Real family incomes are down $4,200 since 2009, the share of people working has dipped to levels not seen in nearly four decades, and the technology sector is laying off people in massive numbers. Food stamp use remains at historic highs, while 1 in 4 Americans aged 25–54 are not employed. We must expose the true facts about what is happening to our workforce, and how the President’s policies are hammering working America. At the pinnacle of this anti-worker agenda is the President’s decision to violate federal law in order to provide work permits and benefits to 5 million unlawful immigrants. As one wise observer noted, the most important feature of governing is to defend our founding charter.

In a new op-ed on Monday evening for Breitbart News, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) lays out what she’s doing to eliminate amnesty.

I have fought the President’s amnesty relentlessly and will continue to do so. Last summer I worked with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to freeze the President’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by passing a bill out of the House. On January 14th, the House passed my Amendment to the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill to once again freeze DACA. The DACA program grants work permits to illegal aliens between the ages of 15 and 33. (subject to limited exception, applicants must have been under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012 and at least 15 years or older to request DACA according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services). I do not believe that President Obama should be putting the needs of illegal aliens over American citizens.

Rep. Rod Blum (R-IA), one of the newly elected Republicans who emboldened the House GOP majority by winning a previously Democrat-controlled seat, said he campaigned and won on securing the border.

“I campaigned for two years in Eastern Iowa and everyone talked about immigration,” Blum said in an interview with Breitbart News at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines this weekend.

First of all, secure the border. In 1986, President Reagan—they passed an amnesty. They promised as American citizens they were going to secure the border, they didn’t follow through. In 2006, when George Bush was president, they had a secure the border build the fence act and they never followed through and did that. Look, they haven’t followed through twice. Not only is it an immigration issue, it’s a national security issue.

There are three amendments that have been offered to a recent bill from House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX)—two from Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) and one from Rep. Steve King (R-IA)—that aides tell Breitbart News would, if added into the McCaul bill during the House Rules Committee process, fix that bill.

One Brat amendment would not consider the border secure until the president’s 2014 executive amnesty, the so-called Morton Memos of non-enforcement, and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program of 2012 were each ended. The second Brat amendment would create a mechanism that would allow Border Patrol to end Obama’s catch-and-release policies, and deport illegal aliens immediately upon capture rather than sending them to ICE processing facilities at which point they’re likely to be kept in the United States. The King amendment would require that all 700 miles of double-layer border fencing required under the Secure Fence Act of 2006 be built, instead of just the 48 miles of double-layer fencing in the bill right now.

It remains to be seen what happens with the McCaul border bill—and whether it passes as is, or gets the fixes included in it that would fulfill GOP election promises to secure the border.