Republicans are scrambling to strategize the best possible way to prevent Obama’s executive order on immigration, and Speaker John Boehner vowed Friday that the House will do whatever it takes to prevent Obama from “damaging the presidency”:
“With this action, the president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms that he claims to seek,” Boehner said in a news conference at the Capitol. “And as I told the president yesterday, he’s damaging the presidency itself.”
The Ohio Republican’s remarks came the morning after Obama delivered a prime-time speech announcing that he would take unilateral action to shield as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Boehner did not specifically weigh in on a debate raging in his conference: whether Congress has the authority to defund Obama’s changes to immigration policy through a bill to fund the government. House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who’s been pushing for an omnibus bill to fund the government through the fiscal year, dismissed such an effort as “impossible.”
“We’re working with our members and looking at the options that are available to us, but I will say to you, the House will, in fact, act,” Boehner said.
Boehner said that, by taking unilateral actions on his healthcare law and immigration reform, Obama has broken any trust that existed with Republicans. But the Speaker reiterated that voters are demanding that both parties come together to fix the immigration system.
“We have a broken immigration system and the American people expect us to work together to fix it,” Boehner said. “We ought to do it through the Democratic process — moving bills through the people’s house, through the Senate, and to the president’s desk.”
