“Rescission” is the term floated on Tuesday by House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers. It’s the mechanism by which he says Congress can pass a long-term congressional resolution to fund the government and then, if and when he issues an executive amnesty, rescind funding for particular programs.
Over the years, the mechanism has been used in a number of ways — some of which have rankled conservatives. They’ve been used, for example, to revoke funding from one program, where it was never intended to be spent in the first place, and funnel it to another. Conservatives didn’t like that gimmick. In 2012, the Washington Post wrote about a group of frustrated freshmen congressmen, including Arkansas’s Tim Griffin, who were looking to get rid of a host of “arcane budget gimmicks involving ‘chimps’ (changes in mandatory spending), budgetary timing shifts and spending cancellations known as ‘rescissions.’”
“I’m all for any rescission that saves money,” Griffin says. “What we had a problem with and still have a problem with are gimmicks. I am completely in favor of a rescission if that’s what we have to do to reign in the president’s unconstitutional and illegal actions that apparently he’s about to take.”
Those on the right flank on the Republican conference, most of whom favor the passage of several short-term funding bills or a longer-term bill that doesn’t fund the Department of Homeland Security, see one problem with using the mechanism now: The president can veto a rescission bill.
That didn’t seem to factor into the comments Rogers made to his colleagues: “Chairman Rogers just got up and said if we pass an omnibus and then the president does this executive amnesty, he said we can rescind it, and we can rescind it with 218 and 51 and we don’t need the president. That’s what he just told me. I’ve never heard that before,” Arizona’s Matt Salmon told Breitbart.
Another GOP congressman tells me: “Rogers claims the House and Senate can vote to rescind with no presidential signature. Uh, not in my Constitution.”