Conservatives Triumph in Border Bill Victory
By Matthew Vadum
Conservatives in Congress scored a major triumph last week as the House approved emergency legislation that strengthens border security and attempts to rein in a lawless president.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a conservative champion, took a well-deserved victory lap in an interview with the WND news website.
The “legislative miracle” approved by the House represents a “stunning turnaround” and “a huge victory for the conservatives in Congress.” Its approval is also a big win for the American people who, Bachmann said, “saved Congress from itself” by jamming the congressional switchboard to state their opposition to President Obama’s planned immigration amnesty.
Bachmann noted the legislation pays states to place National Guard troops on the border, doubling funding for that program. It also responds to the president’s threat that “he would act alone, lawlessly, to grant work permits to 5- to 6 million illegal foreign nationals.”
“We have taken the strongest possible action, legislatively, to stop him,” Bachmann said. “We’ve put the president on notice by saying, ‘You better not issue these work permits because we’ve said no. You better not try it, Mr. President.’”
The bill also provides funding to immigration agencies to house illegal alien children and also amends a 2008 law that was created to block the sex trafficking of young people but which has been used to provide asylum to illegals coming from Central American countries.
Bachmann also marveled at the fact that the bill was even tougher in her view than what anti-amnesty stalwarts Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had thought was politically possible to achieve.
She also rejected President Obama‘s mischievous comment Friday afternoon in which he attacked conservatives for supposedly preventing the House from approving a border-fix measure.
That comment was “infantile,” Bachmann said, noting that the Democrat-controlled Senate is the chamber that has yet to approve a border bill. Republicans hope Senate Democrats take a public relations drubbing in coming weeks for failing to act.
Victory came a day after a conservative-led uprising among House Republicans scuttled Speaker John Boehner’s worse-than-useless border crisis and immigration legislation. “The bill as it was had more loopholes than a knitted afghan,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told FrontPage on Thursday.
The showdown between rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders in the House came as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been staged and carefully choreographed by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration.
Conservatives worried that the GOP establishment bill did not even try to block Obama’s upcoming mass amnesty and did not do enough to crack down on the recent surge of illegals streaming across the country’s southern border.
But on Friday conservative and moderate Republicans united during a House GOP conference meeting and approved stronger legislation to replace the GOP establishment’s weak border bill that Boehner put on the back burner the day before. A $694 million emergency measured aimed at fixing the border crisis was approved by the House later that day on a vote of 223 to 189, freeing House members to begin their delayed three-week summer recess that was supposed to begin Thursday.
The legislation attempts to defang President Obama’s wildly unpopular Deferred Action for Children Arrivals, or DACA, policy that he used to provide asylum to more than 500,000 illegals who came to the U.S. as minors. Separately, the House approved a bill to reverse DACA, which encourages youngsters to make the dangerous trek north from Central America to sneak across the border, on a vote of 216 to 192. Four Democratic lawmakers voted for the measure.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is pressing ahead with plans to illegally grant amnesty to millions of immigration law-breaking foreign nationals present in the country.
It is just one in a long series of Reichstag fires calculated to enhance the power of the neo-Marxist despot who now occupies the Oval Office.
On ABC’s “This Week” yesterday Obama palace heel-clicker Dan Pfeiffer reaffirmed that a huge amnesty is coming. Obama “has no choice but to act” to grant amnesty to as many as five million illegal aliens “at the end of summer,” he said.
After pointing out that Obama said last year that he did not believe he had authority to act unilaterally, an incredulous George Stephanopoulos asked Pfeiffer, “Doesn’t a reversal like that fuel the arguments of those who say that the president is overstepping his authority?”
Pfeiffer said that “whatever [Obama] does in this space will not be a substitute for comprehensive immigration reform. Congress will still need to act.”
“But because of Congress’s failure to fix the immigration system and to pass the supplemental appropriations bill needed to deal with the specific crisis on the border, the president has no choice but to act … at the end of the summer.”
Even the cripplingly affective leftist dead-ender Ed Schultz thinks amnesty-bound Obama is politically suicidal.
“Hold the phone — this would be a mistake if the president were to do this,” Schultz told the phone booth that consists of his MSNBC audience last week.
“Politically, there is no way Democrats can go home and campaign on across-the-board amnesty for millions of undocumented workers … it could be an electoral death knell for the Democrats,” he said.
Recent surveys show Obama’s pro-illegal immigrant policies have the strong support of just 18 percent of the public, compared to the nearly 60 percent who strongly oppose those policies.
“I don’t like government by executive order,” said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). “I just don’t, generally, so I’d have to look and see specifically what [Obama is] proposing and what he’s talking about,” said the left-winger.
Polls now suggest Pryor stands a very good chance of losing to Republican challenger Tom Cotton in November.
Perhaps the senator should have spoken out against the president’s reckless policies earlier.
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