Thursday, July 24, 2014

House Conservatives Oppose ANY Border Bailout

by JASmius

Subsidizing amnesty on the cheap would still be subsidizing amnesty - and stupidly at that:

Conservatives slammed House Speaker John Boehner's plan for $1.5 billion to address the illegal immigration crisis on Wednesday, with some charging to Newsmax that Republicans should spend no additional taxpayer money and force President Barack Obama to rescind the 2012 executive order that they say ignited the crisis.

"This is a problem created by the DACA law," said Louisiana-4 Representative John Fleming. "The president did it by himself."

Fleming referred to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delayed deportations to children who were brought to the U.S. by their parents when they were young and who have remained here illegally.

"It's a huge PR disaster for him — and he can fix it by simply reversing what he did and by telling people that he is not going to give them amnesty," he said.

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, declared: "No border bailout, period."

Indeed.  The issue here isn't funding levels; it is the policy and the lawless, unconstitutional manner in which it was imposed.

Congress would not give Barack Obama his "DREAM" Act, so he got his pen and his phone and Article I Section 1 and decreed the law himself.  Hundreds of thousands of undocumented Democrats from Central America (and [*AHEM*] "elsewhere") took notice, heeded his flimsily disguised recruitment drive, and flooded northward.  Countless numbers of the exodus perished, countless more were raped, molested, and abused, and still more countless migrants contracted - or were deliberately infected with - virulent communicable diseases.  They invaded our country and now they're here, as Barack Obama's intended fait accompli.

But right now, Congressman Fleming is correct: the public's ire is being directed at Barack Obama.  Not that that means all that much to him, since he'll never face another election, but it puts the GOP in the strongest attainable position from which to attempt to whittle down The One's heretofore impregnable position.  As long as the focus is on the policy and O's illegal usurpation of the legislative power to force it on the country to its evident detriment, that policy is at least theoretically malleable.

That clarity vanishes in a puff of smoke if House Republicans give the dictator one red cent to "deal with the border crisis".  It doesn't matter what the details of any such legislation would be; it could be crammed full of border reinforcement provisions and deportation orders and a Pacific-to-Mexico Gulf fence the size of the Great Wall of China and the point of clarity would still be lost.  It would still be effectively to subsidize Obama's amnesty, because he would simply redirect the funding to "resettlement" operations.  Either that or he'd simply veto it as "attempted genocide" or some other manner of patented demagoguery.  Either way the public's animosity would be transferred to House Republicans and Red Barry would be off scot free.

Actually, there is a third possibility.  I keep forgetting that Democrats still control the Senate until January.  Such being the case, any House bill, no matter how hawkish, would be gutted by Harry (G)Reid and replaced with the Regime's shopping list.  At which point Boehner & Co. would have two options: cave, and incur the blithering rage of their own base mere weeks before a midterm election they looked to win in another historic blowout, or stand firm and bring down White House denunciations of "genocidal obstructionism" on their heads that the electorate will buy scarcely any less.

In essence, this "border crisis" bill is a surrogate for the Schumer-Rubio "comprehensive immigration reform" boondoggle that Speaker Boehner just got through giving a mercy killing, with the additional delightful feature that the stakes are logarithmically higher.  And the logical answer is the same.  In fact, it's almost Hypocratic: "First, do no harm".  In this case, that means, yes, "do nothing".  Let O simmer in his own mess.  Let the hoi palloi see that it is he that did this unspeakable harm.  At least keep this issue maximally visible and on the public's front burner.

House conservatives get it, even if the Speaker doesn't:

Fleming labeled the funding request as nothing more than a back-door way for Obama to get House Republicans to agree to comprehensive immigration reform.

Boehner has vowed to address the issue as a series of individual bills — not like the Gang of Eight's legislation that the Democratic-controlled Senate passed last year.

"Once we send [the Senate] something, they can send something back over that we would be forced to vote on," Fleming said. "If we didn't pass it, we would look like we didn't have a heart for children. If it gets passed, it’s going to open a big gap in amnesty for these illegals.
"The Republicans will end up having to deal with the problem. It'll be our problem, even though it was created by the president."

He told Newsmax that a House resolution was preferred by many conservatives.

It would demand that Obama "basically … did his job: defend our borders, rescind DACA, and deport all minors," Fleming said. "He can do all that with his pen and his phone, and there would be no need for us to pass anything.

"As soon as we begin passing legislation that seeks to address the problem, that takes the pressure off him," the congressman added. "There's no reason for him to do anything that's going to be constructive.

"But just to throw $4 billion at him, or even $1.5 billion, at the problem without any guarantee of solutions — many of us Republicans think that's a very bad idea." [emphases added]

It's very simple, Mr. Speaker: If Barack Obama is going to take America down, Republicans should not help him do it.

Period.

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