Conservative lawmakers are pitching a number of legislative proposals to House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and other House Republicans in order to avoid passing a long-term funding bill that would provide President Obama with the money he needs to implement his pending administrative amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.
“We could essentially be green-lighting it if we do a full omnibus in the lame-duck with everything,” says a House Republican who signed Representative Matt Salmon’s letter calling for the House to pass a continuing resolution in the lame-duck session that would prohibit Obama from implementing his executive orders.
The procedure outlined in the letter would set the stage for a lame-duck government shutdown if Obama vetoed the bill or Senate Democrats, who will control the chamber until January, block the bill.
But the House Republican, speaking anonymously about today’s Republican conference meeting and Republican Study Committee meeting, says that Salmon and the other signatories see the letter’s proposal as just one way to oppose the executive amnesty.
“What we want to do is have the next Congress address the Department of Homeland Security [funding],” the lawmaker said. To that end, he said that conservatives are willing to pass a “CROMNIBUS” bill — a bill that combines several appropriations bills for specific departments (the House passed seven during this Congress that the Senate Democrats refused to vote on) with a short-term continuing resolution. The advantage of that, the Republican said, is that it would mean that a full government shutdown would not happen under any circumstances, because major areas of government, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, would already be funded.
“I’m 100 percent supportive of getting funding in areas that are non-controversial so that we can get away from playing this stupid game,” he says, referring to the all-or-nothing continuing-resolution fight. Funding for the entire government currently expires in mid December. “Even if we end up losing on the amnesty down the road, I think people will be much happier about that process,” the representative says.
The Republican says that Boehner stayed “non-committal” in meetings today about what funding proposal he would support, even as House appropriators argued in favor of a long-term spending bill without any immigration-related language.