Conservative activists and think tanks are urging Congress to stick to regular order Tuesday as chatter escalates that a new amnesty bill is in the works to replace DACA.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced the end of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy Tuesday, putting the open-borders constituency’s hopes for amnesty back in Congress’s hands. Many congressional Republicans, who have not been stirred to pass any significant funding for the wall on the southern border nor have made significant progress on the RAISE Act to reduce low-skilled immigration, may spring into action to extend amnesty to the hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients President Barack Obama exempted from the law in a move of questionable constitutionality.
Under “regular order” in Congress, any such bill would have to pass on its own merits, considered first in the subcomittee of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees before moving on to the full committees and then the full vote of each body. Many immigration hawks fear that, as in previous attempts to get Congress to go along with amnesty, open-borders politicians will bypass regular order and tack a mini-“DREAM Act” onto an omnibus bill.
“Regular order is absolutely necessary to ensure that all concerns are addressed. Plus, I believe that the Chairmen of the committees of jurisdiction will insist on regular order,” Center for Immigration Studies Fellow Andrew Arthur assessed in anticipation of the heavily signaled upcoming push for a new amnesty bill.
Even the administration’s announcements of the new policy itself seem to include a thinly veiled hope that Congress would pick up exactly where President Obama and DACA left off, even though, through the tireless efforts of the conservative grassroots and patriotic immigration reform activists, the very similar “DREAM Act” and even broader “Gang of Eight” amnesty bills have been consistently and repeatedly defeated over the last 16 years.
The DHS press release on DACA’s demise made repeated reference to winding DACA down slowly so Congress can have time to legislate. “With the measures the Department is putting in place today, no current beneficiaries will be impacted before March 5, 2018, nearly six months from now,” Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke said, “so Congress can have time to deliver on appropriate legislative solutions.”
The president’s tweet Tuesday only buoyed pro-amnesty hopes for a new law to replace DACA:
Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2017
These hopes have landed on some receptive ears. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), for example, continued to signal his willingness to extend amnesty Tuesday, saying, “At the heart of this issue are young people who came to this country through no fault of their own, and for many of them, it’s the only country they know.”
Seventeen other Republican members of Congress showed their own quibbles with ending DACA before the official announcement was made. These are: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Orin Hatch (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ); and Reps. Jeff Denham (R-CA), David Valadao (R-CA), Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Daniel Donovan (R-NY), Don Bacon (R-NE), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Will Hurd (R-TX), Martha McSally (R-AZ), Scott Taylor (R-VA), Dave Reichert (R-WA), Dan Newhouse (R-WA), and John Faso (R-NY). They can be expected to be joined in the fight to make so-called “dreamer” amnesty the law of the land by reportedly pro-amnesty voices within the administration like Jared Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump.
Opposition has already begun to foment among the conservative immigration hawk alliance that stopped amnesty before and, among, them, Breitbart News found widespread preference that Congress avoid the gimmicks of the past and use regular order.
Dale Wilcox, Executive Director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a sister group to FAIR, was emphatic in his organization’s opposition to amnesty, “no matter what the terms.” He was equally insistent congressional Republicans stick to regular order in handling the latest push, telling Breitbart News:
If Congress is really serious about amnesty, it’s difficult to see how they could do it without going through regular order. Patriotic Americans hate the idea of rewarding those who break our laws. To get them on board, Congress will have to combine amnesty with a slew of patriotic and pro-labor measures, such as mandatory E-verify, fence-funding, the RAISE Act, and, of course, an end to automatic citizenship by birth. Those measures cannot be properly provided for in legislation without going through the normal deliberative process.
The sentiment was mirrored in the conservative grassroots, used to the legislative maneuvers open-borders politicians have tried to use to tack amnesty onto omnibus bills in the past. “I’m always in favor of regular order,” Northern Virginia Tea Party organizer Ron Wilcox told Breitbart News, when asked about expected attempts to legislate a new DACA-like amnesty, calling any program that encourages minors to jump our border illegal “government sponsored kidnapping.”
Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the pro-amnesty gang of eight member pushing hard against a “literal wall,” insisted Congress return to regular order for budget issues in an op-ed last month.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.