I hope you didn’t have the misfortune of actually hearing our President today demand that the current Congress send him a “compromise” illegal immigration amnesty bill of some kind to his desk, lest he go through with his promised executive order to provide an amnesty to millions of illegals on his own. Were he to make such an order, it would be the most dramatic violation of the U.S. Constitution by any president in our history. In my judgment, it has been obscene to have heard him, as we have since July, even raise the possibility of it, and all the more so to witness the legacy media and Democratic Party leadership raise barely a whisper against it. But he did reaffirm his promise to make such an order today, and in what NRO’s Rich Lowry correctly labels as “blackmail,” suggested it would be Congress’s fault if he did so.
So what should the GOP representatives do in response to this threat? Two guys expert in the ways of Washington, Yuval Levin and Andrew McCarthy, today put their two cents in today on NRO. Now Levin only really mentioned this issue in passing, as part of his sage general review of how the GOP Congress should now proceed after the election victories:
If he goes ahead with an executive amnesty, for instance, Republicans should use the CR [continuing resolution] and budget process to stop him, forcing Democrats to decide whether they will publicly endorse his actions and forcing him to decide if he will risk a shutdown on behalf of such a brazen overreach after the shellacking his party has just taken from the public.
Okay, that sounds good, and way better than pretending a court case will do anything, or resorting to impeachment, which of course unless the threat of such caused Obama to back down, would 1) only amount to a black mark on his record as there is no possibility of his conviction by the requisite two-thirds vote in the Senate, 2) could result in a serious public opinion backlash, and would 3) not stop the amnesty itself.
But would the budget/CR strategy itself stop or seriously impair the amnesty? The order for the new cards is already in the works, and the essence of the “temporary” status simply involves federal agents not enforcing laws, and Obama has existing funds of money at his command, so it seems to me he doesn’t need more money from Congress to do it. With all the humility of ready-to-be-schooled ignorance, I ask Yuval, or anyone who knows: “Am I missing something here?”
Perhaps even if there is no way the power of the purse can touch implementation of the Big Amnesty order, the idea Yuval’s really referring to is that the GOP could hold the operation of nearly the entire government hostage to Obama rescinding, or promising not to issue, the order. I.e., it would be the usual shut-down politics but for higher and clearer stakes. Hmm… I’m not sure that such a scenario would involve that much less risk of a public opinion backlash than the impeachment one would.
How does such a CR/budget strategy sound as described by Andrew McCarthy, then? Well, it involves a lot of moving parts. Wild-card #1 is whether those Republican reps who really would like to arrive at a compromise amnesty law with Obama have the chutzpah and the numbers to try such during the lame-duck session. If they do, all bets are off. Wild-card #2 is whether the current Republican reps might try to forge a budget compromise with Obama that goes well beyond January. And there’s much more in play than just these, as McCarthy rightly says the new Congress will have to consider more than simply the Big Amnesty threat:
The incoming Republican majority will have only one way to stop the president: Use the power of the purse to cut off the money Obama needs to do the lawless things the voters are up in arms about. Republicans will be toast with the people who have empowered them if they now turn around and agree to fund Obamacare, the Homeland Security’s immigration agencies and the Justice Department that refuse to enforce the laws, the IRS that colludes with Democrats to intimidate the Left’s ideological opponents, and all the rest of it. The prattle from GOP leaders that they must show the country they can “govern” is ridiculous. It is not possible for them to “govern” when the chief executive does not faithfully execute the laws they enact. Besides, voters did not elect them to govern – they elected them to stop Obama.
Amen, and note that by “stop Obama,” McCarthy mainly means, contain his activities to legal ones. He continues by describing the present choice about the CR:
If Republicans join the Democrats who have just been swept out of office to fund the government for the next year, they will be forfeiting the power of the purse. Before it even gets started, the incoming Republican-controlled Congress would be stripped of its last tool to stop executive maladministration.
The lame-duck session is a terrible idea. …At this point, it probably cannot be called off — the government…runs out of money on December 11. But Republicans should resist anything other than a short continuing resolution that funds the government until the next Congress takes over in January.…[this] would keep the Republicans’ options open to strip spending authority from the executive branch and pressure Obama to act lawfully. It is the only way they can turn back Obama’s immigration amnesty…
So: any shut-down showdown that happens will do so due to multiple issues. The Big Amnesty order will be one issue among others. Its very clear and big sins against constitutionality, democracy, and peacemaking, are not going to be subject to any up-or-down vote of approval or disapproval, but will get lumped in with a very complex and uncertain case about IRS abuses, and much else; and then it will be balanced in the public mind against the pain the shut-down will cause, and whatever bargaining occurs to end it.
Complexity always diminishes democratic accountability. The particular complexity I’m sketching here could become very harmful in the situation we may be entering. Are we truly Constitutional Conservatives? Does the GOP, or National Review, for that matter, call upon the public to be so? But the public cannot stand up for the Constitution when their elected defenders of it give them no role, nor any clear vote to judge their representatives by, and say in effect, “Trust us to do the Byzantine bundled bargaining on this.” That’s not going to cut it here. Either the Republican Party is saying “no way” to Obama’s proposed abomination or it is not.
I invite those who think the strategy that Levin and McCarthy point towards will work to explain to us why it will, and why we shouldn’t begin demanding that our present (and soon-to-be-seated) representatives schedule caucus votes on whether to threaten Obama with stronger remedies.