Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) will reportedly cave to President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty and will support U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch for Attorney General, several media outlets are reporting.
“Sen. Mark Kirk said Thursday he would support Loretta Lynch for attorney general, adding further momentum to her long-delayed nomination,” the Chicago Sun Times’ Tina Sfondeles wrote. “Kirk made his remarks during a luncheon speech appearance at the City Club. It came in response to a question from the audience. He said he visited with Lynch and spoke with her about getting federal support to ‘crush’ criminal gangs in Illinois. That discussion helped to convince him, he said.”
Kirk’s statement puts five Republicans on record as supportive of her. He joins Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Susan Collins (R-ME). Assuming all Democrats vote for her—Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has finally relented and said he will vote for her, even though the Department of Justice she would head if confirmed just indicted him and his donor friend Dr. Salamon Melgen on Wednesday—the now five Republicans who plan to vote for her would prevent a need for Vice President Joe Biden to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
Kirk is up for re-election in 2016, and after having barely been elected to the Senate in 2010, he is likely to be primaried from the right and face a tough re-election. Conservatives are highly unlikely to provide him any support if he does follow through with his plans to back Lynch, meaning this decision could backfire in an extraordinarily significant way for him as he seeks re-election.
A vote for Lynch’s confirmation is a vote to uphold President Obama’s executive amnesty order, as senators including John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have said.
In a lengthy statement he issued after Lynch testified during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions said that a vote for Lynch “would bring us another step closer to the point’s edge” of the “dangerous moment” that he described the nation as being at because of Obama’s executive amnesty—which Sessions quoted liberal constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley as saying puts America on a “constitutional tipping point.”
“President Obama’s executive amnesty represents one of the most breathtaking exertions of executive power in the history of this country,” Sessions said in his statement against Lynch. “After Congress rejected the President’s favored immigration legislation, the White House met with the interest groups who had crafted that bill and implemented the major provisions of the legislation that Congress had rejected through executive fiat.”
Sessions added that Lynch’s “unambiguous declaration” that illegal aliens have “the right and the obligation to work” in America “regardless of status” further troubles him.
“Such a notion of civil rights, as Civil Rights Commission Member Peter Kirsanow articulated, is ‘incoherent and ahistorical,’” Sessions said. “Essential to civil rights is the equal and uniform application of the laws. When the President capriciously suspends those laws and provides benefits to people here unlawfully, he injures the rights of lawful workers—denying them the protections Congress passed to secure their jobs and wages.”
McCain has similarly urged all of his colleagues to vote against Lynch—a clarion call he made after his likely 2016 primary challenger state Sen. Kelli Ward said in a Breitbart News exclusive that McCain would be personally responsible for Lynch’s confirmation even if he voted against her when his buddies in the Senate are planning to vote for her. If Lynch is confirmed, it would be a massive deal in the likely primary McCain will face.
“Loretta Lynch has said that the President’s unconstitutional executive orders are ‘reasonable,’” McCain said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program a couple weeks ago, when Hewitt—an establishment radio host—seemed to endorse his re-election over McCain’s likely Republican alternatives.
Then if that is the case, no Republican should vote for her confirmation, because she is going to implement what the President himself said 22 times would be unconstitutional actions. And by the way, I also believe that Mitch McConnell is right that we should not even bring it up until we get this human trafficking bill disposed of. Children are being mistreated in the worst possible ways while we dither over a provision in the bill which was long ago settled.
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