With Republicans finally in control of Congress and the Latino vote for 2016 already hanging in the balance, the House speaker, John Boehner, has announced his latest strategy for torpedoing Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration reform: try to sue the president. One more time.
Despite the objections of some scholars on presidential privilege following a congressional suit on the president’s healthcare law last year, Boehner reportedly told party members at a closed-door session on Tuesday that he is “finalizing” legal options.
This time, the challenge apparently focuses on a White House order from November regarding documentation for 11 million people living in the US. Whether the legal action from Congress would apply to Obama’s order on so-called “deferred action” for child immigrants remains unclear, according to National Journal.
In the hours leading up to Tuesday’s meeting, Republicans in the House postponed a vote on a border security bill maligned by conservatives and Democrats alike. Republican leaders blamed the delay on a north-east snowstorm, while many critics sought to jump on the legislative change as a fresh example of Republicans having a difficult time aligning in their first month in power of both chambers of Congress.
“There have been a couple of stumbles,” Boehner said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The House has managed to approve a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that is loaded with amendments attacking parts of Obama’s executive action. The administration has issued a veto threat on the bill.
Sean Theriault, an associate professor of government at the University of Texas, said Boehner must walk a fine line in appeasing members of his party without making things awkward for a cast of potential Republican presidential nominees who are already beginning to court voters for whom immigration is a top issue.
“On the one hand, he has a bunch of fire-breathing conservatives bearing down his neck, mandating that he do something,” Theriault said. “But then there is the practical realities that he is a member of the Republican party that would like to once again some day be again in the White House.”
The Latino vote is widely credited for edging Obama ahead in the past two presidential elections. An estimated 28 million Latinos will be eligible to vote by the 2016 election, according to a May 2014 report by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
A swift move to push back against executive action on immigration matters less in the presidential primaries, Theriault said, when the specifics of the documentation issue tends to be less of a focus than the fuller prospect of, say, Jeb Bush as candidate. “It’s certainly more popular than not among their constituents, but their constituents alone can’t elect the next president,” said Theriault.
Ruben Gallego, a Democratic representative from Arizona, said the legal threat reveals a Republican party focused on “anti-immigrant politics”.
“Instead of doing their job and working to pass a bill that addresses our immigration system once and for all, Republicans are trying to one up themselves to prove to the extreme wing of their party just how anti-immigrant they are,” Gallego said.
A suit would not be the first against the executive action on Obama’s plan to shield undocumented immigrants – governors from 25 states have also filed suit against the action in the case Texas v United States. If the suit progresses and were to directly name Obama, however, it could be the first instance of Congress directly suing the president of the United States.
The House of Representatives as a whole has never sued the president, according to Politifact. Suits can be brought against other members of the executive branch as stand-ins for the administration’s policies, as with another suit orchestrated by Boehner.
As Republicans became increasingly frustrated with Obama’s use of the power of his office to act without the other branches, the House in July authorized a challenge to Obama administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but did not name the president as a defendant. The suit was officially filed in November 2014, a day after Obama announced his executive action on immigration.
“So sue me,” the president said at the time.
