Today, the House voted on immigration. But it wasn’t on an effort to reform our broken system, or on the bipartisan bill the Senate passed more than 500 days ago. Nope. Instead, House leaders held a vote that would make our broken immigration system worse, not better.
Unproductive doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s all part of the Republican House’s pattern of payback politics — lawsuits, talks of impeachment and shutting down the government, all because the President took common-sense action in the face of congressional gridlock to make our nation and families stronger.
The bill they voted on? That would be HR5759. Roll Call Vote 550:
BILL TITLE: To establish a rule of construction clarifying the limitations on executive authority to provide certain forms of immigration relief
No provision of the Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act (of 1965), or other federal law shall be interpreted or applied to authorize the executive branch of the government to exempt, by executive order, regulation, or any other means, categories of persons unlawfully present in the United States from removal under the immigration laws.
Declares any action by the executive branch with the purpose of circumventing the objectives of this statute null and void and without legal effect.
Makes this Act EFFECTIVE RETROACTIVELY, applying to any such exemption made AT ANY TIME. (emphasis added)
The vote was 219-197 with 3 Democrats (Barrow, McIntyre and Peterson) voting FOR passage, and only 7 Republicans (Coffman, Denham, Diaz-Belart, Gohmert, Ros-Lehtinen, Stutzman and Valadio) voting against it. And yes of course, our illustrious representative from Nevada Congressional District 2, Mr. Mark Amodei was thrilled to cast his AYE vote as a “symbolic message” that, “that black guy in the oval office has no business doing what every President since ‘Ike’ has done via ‘executive action’.”
So, they want to retroactively nullify executive action of the President. Really? Did they bother to read the bill they just passed? What are they nullifying? Actions just this President? Or, for curiosity’s sake, is their intent to nullify immigration-related actions taken by each and every President since 1956? It does after all say, that it applies RETROACTIVELY, to ANY such exemption made at ANY time.
Talk about hypocrisy. Apparently, if it’s intent is to apply ONLY to actions by President Obama, it’s okay for them to be ambiguous in bill that they themselves choose to pass, but how dare those heathenish Democrats pass a bill the Republicans claim is ambiguous as to healthcare subsidies! That just cannot be and they’ll make sure it can’t be, by wasting taxpayer money to take >50 votes to kill it, by suing the President for not implementing on a timely bases that same bill they’re trying to kill, and by goading their benefactor buddies into pursuing nullification of various provisions of that bill through all levels of the judiciary up to and including, the Supreme Corporate (oops, I mean Supreme Court).
The outright blatant hypocrisy of their ambiguous actions is immoral, unethical and UNchristian.