Boehner: Time for GOP-Led Congress to Deal with Immigration

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said it is time for a Republican-led Congress to move an immigration bill forward, so long as President Obama doesn’t “burn himself” by enacting executive amnesty before the end of the year. 

In his first press conference since Republicans won back Congress on Tuesday, Boehner warned that Obama would “poison the well” if he enacts executive amnesty “outside of his authority” and said there will be “no chance for immigration reform moving in this Congress” if Obama does so. Boehner said Obama “is inviting big trouble” with his executive amnesty, which Obama declared on Wednesday that he will enact even after Democrats were thumped on Tuesday. 

“When you play with matches, you take the risk of burning yourself. And he’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path,” Boehner said. “The American people made it clear on Election Day–they want to get things done, and they don’t want the president acting on a unilateral basis.” 

Referring to immigration, Boehner also said that “it is time for the Congress of the United States to deal with a very difficult issue in our society.” He noted that immigration has become a “political football” over the last ten years and said it is his personal belief that “it’s just time to deal with this.”

Like Obama, Boehner, who said that the immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed, said what held up amnesty legislation in this Congress “was the flood of kids coming across the border because of actions that the president had already taken.” Boehner, who reportedly told President Barack Obama that he could get amnesty legislation done in the next Congress, said Americans from the left and the right “started to look at the issue in a very different way.” That only happened after Breitbart Texas published leaked photos of illegal immigrants being warehoused, which forced the mainstream press to cover the issue.