Fox News — House Republicans voted Wednesday to overturn President Obama’s immigration actions from last November — and reached all the way back to unravel a 2012 directive affecting illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children — sending the bill to the Senate where it faces an uncertain fate.
The House voted 236-191 to approve legislation funding the Homeland Security Department through the rest of the budget year to the tune of $40 billion. But as part of that legislation, Republicans added provisions to gut the president’s immigration directives.
Despite deep Democratic opposition, the House voted 237-190 on an amendment to undo executive actions Obama announced in November that provided temporary deportation relief, and offer work permits, to some 4 million illegal immigrants.
Another amendment would cancel Obama’s 2012 policy that’s granted work permits and stays of deportation to more than 600,000 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally as kids. That measure passed more narrowly, 218-209, as more than two dozen Republicans joined Democrats in opposition.
Republicans say Obama’s moves amounted to an unconstitutional overreach that must be stopped.
“We do not take this action lightly, but simply there is no alternative,” House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday. “It’s not a dispute between the parties or even between the branches of our government. This executive overreach is an affront to the rule of law and to the Constitution itself.”
But Democratic leaders claimed the GOP provisions would hurt immigrant families — and ultimately hurt Republicans politically.
“The amendments … that the Republicans are tacking onto the bill, or at least trying to tack onto the bill, to keep the Department of Homeland Security open are inconsistent with our nation’s values and its history. They would tear families apart,” House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said.
Even with Republicans in control of the Senate the bill faces tough chances there, especially because House GOP leaders decided to satisfy demands from conservative members by including a vote to undo the 2012 policy that deals with younger immigrants known as “Dreamers.” The amendment, which is opposed by some of the more moderate Republicans in the House, would ultimately expose those young people to deportation.
Security-minded lawmakers on both sides of the aisle also are worried about using the DHS funding bill to wage the immigration fight, saying security funding should not be put at risk, particularly in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. Current DHS funding expires at the end of next month.
In the Senate, Republicans would have to rally a 60-vote majority to advance the legislation, and they have only 54 members.
With even some Republicans voicing reservations, the Senate may have to strip out the immigration provisions and send a straight DHS funding bill back to the House, as the Feb. 27 deadline looms.
This, then, could set up another fight between GOP leadership and the conservative reaches of the party.
One senior House GOP aide told Fox News, “I don’t know how this one ends.”
Some House Republicans acknowledged that the Senate is likely to reject their approach, perhaps forcing them in the end to pass a Homeland Security funding bill stripped of the immigration provisions.
“They’re not going to pass this bill,” Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., said in predicting the Senate outcome.
Obama has threatened to veto the House bill, and Democrats roundly denounced it, even as immigrant advocates warned Republicans they risked alienating Latino voters who will be crucial to the 2016 presidential election.
“Just two weeks into this new Congress, Republicans have turned a bipartisan issue, funding our Department of Homeland Security, into a cesspool of despicable amendments that cater to the most extremist anti-immigrant fringe,” Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said in a House debate.
Why does the reversal of Obummer’s executive edict have to be hidden in an HSA funding Bill? Let it stand alone and speak out since a vast majority of Americans, including legal immigrants, are for limiting Exeutive powers according to the Constitution, and against rewarding felons! We must not let anyone destroy the USA from within!
I am for reversing this and all edicts by the Executive branch of government. Just don’t try to hide it in another Bill (of which I am against). The Patriot Act needs to be reversed also, HSA must be defended, and the Constitution just be adhered to. End of story!
if they want to keep families together, send all their asses back across the border, period.
Traitors like Steny Hoyer need to be sent to a socialist country where they can be happy. They have declared war on loyal AMERICANS!
We are not breaking families, the parents did that.
It is time to place responsibility where it belongs.
These”kids” have gang marks on them, they keep finding bodies with cut head and now found heads, also found signs of torture, and not just a few, but mass execution. Our question is “how do these people we importing differs from ISIS and the rest of them??? Lets ask Congress if they want the responsibility of what thy are importing.
You sneak into a foreign country, illegally, knowing all along you can be deported, and you choose to irresponsibly have children in an already unsustainable situation, and you blame all that on Americans? ….. great parenting by the way and so well thought out… this story is all too familiar and there’s absolutely no reason to accept, or tolerate it….we, the American taxpayer, will end up stuck with the bill….take it home and fix your own sorry country, we are fresh out of vacancies and the uninvited guests are now free to leave…you have overstayed your welcome and you can take your children with you, it’s your own responsibility to take care of them, not ours.
Sherri: CORRECT! True Americans do not want these low lifes in America! In fact, true Americans do not want obama in America! It is too bad obama’s mother did not visit an abortion clinic! True Americans would have been sooooooo glad if she had!
And when you leave, please, please take obama and the rest of the DEMOCRAPS with you!
The GOP RINOS in the senate will back away!
Send them all packing! We have the right to decide the kind of people we want to immigrate to our country and we have enough moochers and scumbags already!
We’ve educated them. Now send the families home. It’s time for them to take back their own country and educate their country’s children. On the other hand, send the Democrats with them to ensure they are taken care of by their own country!
They always have an excuse to stay illegally. Dropping a baby is their greatest hope. Sickening but true.
Liberal/socialist/Democratic (LSD) “leaders” are saying that blocking the President’s unconstitutional overreach will “hurt” the GOP? Like they’re concerned.
Has it occurred to those LSD “leaders,” and by the by, their RINO allies, that one of the biggest reasons that the GOP was able to increase its majority in the House, and win control of the Senate, was that We, the People oppose the President’s unconstitutional overreach? Will those LSD “leaders” explain how standing with We, the People, behind the U.S. Constitution will “hurt” the GOP? Can they?
As for how the bill fares in the Senate, what’s important is that the GOP majority votes to support it. All the GOP has to do is to force the LSDs to take a stance on the issue. What really matters is that the House, which controls the purse, has voted to defund the President’s Executive Order. Now, they need to stand by their action, and explain why they took it.
I am glad that they stood against Obama, but it sure took them a long time…if they don’t want separating families, then they should take their piss pot asses back where they came from and then they will be w/their families. It is disgusting that congress allows that arab in the WH to let tatted gangs into our country, they cut off heads too, not unlike mideastern terrorists. Congress thinks they will never have to live with these monsters, they might be in for a surprise.
then they don’t have to do a thing except collect even larger welfare benefits.
You took the thought right out of my head…
I really wish that the children did not have access to our schools, it is just wrong to give to people who should not be here, then they demand and never leave.
Well said..
The demwits are afraid that they won’t be able to take advantage of the illegal alien socialist leaning hoards becoming voters, since their constituents are dwindling. ….so they try to scare the repukes….but the American people overwhelmingly said no to amnesty and that’s why they were elected, to stop ocommie, and his illegal unconstitutional amnesty.
Right with you. I just find it interesting when the LSDs offer their cynical “helpful advice.”
I literally believe LSD’S are on LSD with their progressive backwards revisionist agenda.
You may be on to something, although I use the LSD abbreviation because it’s easier than spelling out liberal/socialist/Democrat all the time.
I refer to them as demwit libtrash.