Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) says that Congress can “never acquiesce” to providing any taxpayer dollars to President Obama’s executive amnesty, especially in the wake of the federal court ruling that it is illegal and unconstitutional.
“The Court’s ruling is yet further affirmation that the President’s action – as the President himself admitted many times – is illegal,” Sessions said in a statement Tuesday. “President Obama has suspended some 500 pages of existing immigration law passed by the representatives of the American people, and replaced it with the very measures those representatives have repeatedly rejected. The President’s action violates our laws, our Constitution, and the centuries of legal heritage that yielded our Republic.”
Sessions added that Congress should stand strong with the courts against Obama’s illegal executive amnesty and not give any tax dollars to the president’s plans to implement it—which have officially been halted as of Tuesday.
“Congress, so threatened, can never acquiesce to this action by funding it,” Sessions said.
The President has acted unconstitutionally, and it is the President – not Congress – who must back down. We are a coequal branch of government, delegated with the powers necessary to defend our institution and our Constitutional role. We cannot and must not establish the precedent that we will fund illegal actions on the hope that another branch of government will intervene and strike down that illegal action at some later point. To establish such a precedent would be to empower any future President to demand Congress fund any unlawful decree, and then assert that Congress is ‘shutting down the government’ unless this illegal, off-the-books program is funded. Congress must reassert its waning power. We must reestablish the constitutional principle that the people’s representatives control the purse.
Sessions also said that the Democrats in Congress must stop filibustering the House-passed DHS funding bill that blocks executive amnesty.
“This ruling is not an escape hatch for Democrat lawmakers who have been filibustering the House bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security and block illegal amnesty,” Sessions said.
Congress cannot fund the very action which dissolves Congress’s lawmaking powers. Rather, today’s ruling should furnish our colleagues with yet one more reason to end their filibuster. President Obama has already shut down the Department of Homeland Security by ordering tens of thousands of immigration officers and agents to violate our laws and their oaths, sabotaging immigration enforcement and border control. Republicans are trying every day to restore Homeland Security – only a Democrat filibuster stands in the way.
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