With his actions, Boehner said, Obama “deliberately sabotaged” any chance of comprehensive immigration legislation, and by acting “like a king” he is also “damaging the presidency.”
Once again it’s too little too late for Boehner. Is he just talking tough like usual or will he finally…FINALLY…take some action?
[youtube]http://youtu.be/PLdVDM_b2V4[/youtube]
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed Friday to confront President Obama’s unilateral executive actions to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, saying the moves were “damaging the presidency” and warning that Congress will not let them stand without a fight.
“The House will, in fact, act,” he said.
…”He created an environment where the members could not trust him, and trying to find a way to work together was virtually impossible, and I had warned the president over and over that his actions were making it impossible for me to do what he wanted me to do,” the speaker said, explaining his inability to even consider smaller pieces of the 2013 Senate-approved legislation that revamped border and immigration laws.
“We have a broken immigration system, and the American people expect us to work together to fix it, and we ought to do it through the democratic process,” he said.
He broke it all down in one sentence:
“you can’t ask the elected representatives of the people to trust you to enforce the law if you’re constantly demonstrated that you can’t be trusted to enforce the law.”
Obama has purposely made it impossible for either side to trust each other for at least a generation. That will be his legacy.
“What did the president do? He pulled the pin on the grenade two weeks after the election,” said Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, a Boehner ally. “I don’t think anybody knows or can predict what happens and the carnage that this creates quite frankly for the legislative process.”
Many people are saying there is nothing that the Republicans can do about this action by the President. That may very well be but I like Ed Morrissey’s ideas:
They can sit on Obama’s appointments for a long while, for one thing, which Democrats will be helpless to stop. More to the issue, they can pass a tough border-security bill as I suggested earlier and force Obama to veto it, and vulnerable Democrats to sustain a veto on a popular component of immigration reform. As the border gets rushed by people looking to take advantage of the situation, Republicans can lay the entire blame on Obama and his half-baked amnesty plan. None of these are perfect, but with control of Congress, the GOP has better options in January than they do right now.
Will Boehner actually act this time? I have my doubts but if there was ever going to be a chance of the man showing some balls this is it.
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