Exclusive: House GOP Leaders Trick 216 House Republicans into
Accidentally Supporting Obama's Executive Amnesty by Matthew Boyle 7 Dec 2014
In a lengthy interview on Friday afternoon, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
exposed how House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and
Majority Whip Steve Scalise strengthened President Barack Obama’s executive
amnesty with procedural trickery former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obamacare
architect Jonathan Gruber would envy—and they did it all in the name of pushing
a bill that they told Republicans would block Obama’s executive amnesty.
What’s more is that a
series of interviews and recent developments indicate that Boehner’s gambit
here is placing several of his top lieutenants—including at least two committee
chairmen—at political risk of serious primary challenges just a few months
after newly elected Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) beat now former House Majority Leader
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a Republican primary.
Gohmert said most
members had no idea what they were actually voting for when 219 members—216 of
which were Republicans—approved a measure, H.R. 5759, first put forward by Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL), but subsequently dramatically altered by
leadership officials in the Rules Committee process.
“I was a cosponsor of
the original Yoho bill. I thought it was a very decent bill, it was very
short—it was only about a page and a half—and it basically said that anything
the president did in violation of current law including what he’s done with
ordering work permits for people who are illegally here, it’s illegal,” Gohmert
said.
It’s outside the
constitutional bounds. If you came through the Speaker’s lobby on the way to
the House floor as so many people do, there’s tables there in the Speaker’s
lobby that have copies of all the official bills we are taking up that day.
There was official copies of H.R. 5759 out there—and they were the short page
and a half bill that Representative Yoho had originally filed. But the night
before there was an amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 5759—what
that means is that it’s a new bill. It’s different but it’s going to substitute
in its entirety the original bill. It had some of Yoho’s original language in
it but they eliminated from the title the word "amnesty" and replaced
it with "executive overreach." Then they had a bunch of ‘findings’
that sounded tough that make it clear the president is not authorized to do
what he did. Section One is the short title of the bill. Section Two is the
findings that got added, which sounded tough. Section Three is the operative
section though.
Gohmert walked Breitbart
News through the text of Section Three of the new bill line by line, explaining
how each word fits into the legal patchwork of immigration law before getting
to the key additions that were made without notifying many of the members who
voted for it.
“They added another
section called ‘exceptions.’ And the exceptions part says this ‘shall apply
except’ and then there’s three parts,” Gohmert said while reading the actual
text of the bill on the phone with Breitbart News.
The third one is
"for humanitarian purposes where the aliens are at imminent risk of
serious bodily harm or death." That’s what they added. Well, this president
has been arguing for months that the things he’s doing is because these people
are at imminent risk of serious bodily harm and that’s why he’s doing them. So
actually by adding this exception it gives the president for the first time a
solid statutory basis to argue that providing those work permits is now legal.
Gohmert said that this
addition gives President Obama a foot in the door for a legal argument
justifying executive amnesty.
“By adding that
exception to the original bill, we would now give the president the statutory
authority to do what he’s doing to issue these work permits,” Gohmert said. “I
know that this language is in there for people claiming asylum and for refugee
status, but not ever for providing work permits. But by adding this to this
bill that’s supposed to claim his effort to provide work permits is illegal,
unconstitutional, and inappropriate, the exception that was added gives him a
statutory basis for arguing his work permits are now statutorily allowed.”
“I understand that the
president issued a veto threat if we were going to pass this, but I think that
was to give this bill more credibility after this language was added,” Gohmert
added. “I understand Harry Reid said he’s never going to take this up. But if
Harry Reid took it and passed it in the Senate, and the president signed it,
then I think it gives the president a statutory basis to argue he has the power
to issue these work permits now.”
Gohmert says that even
he doesn’t think that it should be interpreted as such—just that it gives the
president something to lean on. “I don’t necessarily agree that this should be
interpreted that this exception gives the president the authority to do what
he’s done,” Gohmert said. “What I’m saying is this gives him the argument that
it does.”
However, Yoho’s office
challenges the assertion that this loophole that was inserted into his new
bill—which his office does admit was an “alternative” bill, different than his
original legislation—would give the president such a legal argument.
Yoho spokesman Brian
Kaveney told Breitbart News that “that exception already exists under the
Executive's constitutional foreign affairs powers – Chinese in Tiananmen
Square, Cubans in the 1960s, etc.”
“Obama is not using a
humanitarian argument for his actions; he is citing prioritization and
prosecutorial discretion for his legal bases,” Kaveney said.
Even if he were using a
humanitarian argument, his actions would not fit these exceptions. Previous
presidents simply granted voluntary departure to certain children and spouses
to match congressional legislation – clearly much different than what Obama is
attempting to do. Even Obama would have a hard time explaining how 5-8 million
people, already here, are under threat of imminent risk of serious bodily harm
or death. That exception was specifically written that way to pay respect to
the foreign policy powers previously discussed but limit any other wild
interpretation.
Yoho’s bill is the
centerpiece of Boehner’s plan to pass a longterm CR-omnibus strategy that funds
Obama’s executive amnesty until at least March 2015, and probably forever.
Nationally syndicated
radio host Laura Ingraham cut Yoho to pieces in an interview last week in which
Yoho had no idea how to explain what he was doing.
“Congressman, you know I
like you,” she told him. “We’ve had you on before. But I’m just going to say it
because I say the truth.”
“All right,” Yoho
responded.
“I think you’re getting
played here,” she said. "I really do."
Congressman, you are
giving the establishment the cover that they desperately crave because they
know America is onto this. We’ve been played for fools before. "We’re
going to fight for you, we’re going to stop this. Da da da. We have limited
ability to do this. We don’t have Congress, we’re gonna wait until January to
do this." Then we find out it’s an omnibus spending bill that funds the
whole government until the end of next summer, taking away a lot of opportunity
to really hone in on those specifics. So my question here is a simple one,
because I think you are one of our real hopes here—I really do.
“Well, I appreciate
that,” Yoho interjected.
“In March, has Boehner
guaranteed to you he will pick up where Jeff Sessions left off, because
Sessions has the right play here—he knows how to deal with this,” Ingraham
asked. “Has he pledged to you he will replace this bill with the Sessions
bill?”
Yoho ducked in his
response. “We haven’t gone that far,” he said. “And again, Laura, what we’re
dealing with is crisis management up here. Over and over again.”
Gohmert said that it was
House GOP leadership who made the changes to the Yoho legislation and they did
so through the Rules Committee.
“All I know is that
someone from our leadership sent the Rules Committee on Wednesday night, right
before the Rules Committee met, emailed them this new version—the new
version—of 5759 and so that’s what the Rules Committee took up late the night
before, this amendment in the nature of a substitute,” Gohmert said when asked
if he knows who made the specific alterations. “I don’t know who specifically
sent it to Rules, but this was sent to Rules from someone in our leadership
saying this is the new bill, it’s an amendment in the nature of a substitute
and this is what we want to come to the floor tomorrow.”
“Normally it would be
from either the Majority Leader’s office or the Speaker’s office,” Gohmert
added when asked which person from GOP leadership would have done this. The
Majority Whip Scalise’s role in this, Gohmert said, was whipping votes for the
original—not the alternative—Yoho bill.
“We were being
whipped—or asked if we were going to vote for the Yoho bill—a day before they
even put this new language, the amendment in the nature of a substitute, up,”
Gohmert said. “That went up on the Rules Committee website late on Wednesday
night, but on Tuesday they were asking people if they were going to vote for
the Yoho bill. They were doing a whip count. They were doing a whip count on
the Yoho bill without people even knowing what they were going to be adding to
it.”
Yoho’s office admits
that other congressional offices were involved in the alterations to his
legislation, but won’t name names. “A few conservative offices reached out to
us regarding wanting to make language more explicit and make sure it
statutorily makes sense,” Yoho spokesman Brian Kaveney said.
We also wanted to focus
on the fact that this was an overreach. The humanitarian exception was added
because given Rep. Yoho's strong Constitutional views, we did not want our bill
to overreach into the foreign affairs powers that presidents have (again, not
saying we agree, but these powers have been affirmed by jurisprudence). Without
this exception, we risked having a possible constitutional flaw that might have
threatened the bill. That was a determination and decision that was made by our
office, given Rep. Yoho's Constitutional principles.
Kaveney has not
responded to followup requests for comment to say which “conservative offices”
were involved in these changes or if those “conservative offices” included
anyone from leadership. It’s worth noting that Yoho did vote against Boehner
for Speaker at the beginning of the last Congress and may do so again in the
future.
Kaveney did, however,
insist on making clear that Yoho’s original bill was his own creation—and something
he took to leadership, not the other way around.
“We took this bill to
leadership. Not the other way around. We are the ones who asked them to bring
this on the floor,” Kaveney said.
Members were not
provided the new text of the bill before they were asked to vote on it,
either—something that should infuriate Americans, Gohmert said.
“I checked with the
clerk before I left the House floor yesterday to see if there were any copies
that were made available for members with these new changes on there,” Gohmert
said.
The clerk said that they
had to make the changes on their own copy but if someone wanted them to make
them a copy, they’d certainly make them a copy—but they’d have to leave the
floor and go into an adjoining office and make a copy. But the copies that were
available did not have these changes in there. If you wanted to see this, you’d
have to do it one of two ways—you’d have to know to go the Rules Committee
website and download what they actually approved for the House floor very late
Wednesday night. The only other way would be to go to the Clerk’s desk there
right below the Speaker’s and say you would like a copy not of 5759, but of the
amendment in the nature of a substitute. If you asked for the bill, you would
get 5759—which we did not vote for. But if you asked for the amendment in the
nature of the substitute, you would get the newly penciled language.
When asked if this is
getting into “you have to pass it to find out what’s in it” territory—the
famous line from then Speaker Nancy Pelosi about Obamacare—Gohmert said,
“that’s what concerns me.” Gohmert said this bill and the recent National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was packed with legislative pork and federal land grab
provisions, are violations of Republicans’ promises to the American people in
the wake of Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare passage.
“There were not three
days for members to review this language,” Gohmert said.
There were not three
days to review the NDAA, and I voted against the NDAA because we didn’t know
everything that was in it. That’s a big bill and it of course it is very
important—and I didn’t have time to read it. It was again provided to Rules
Committee the night before, and yes I understand that much of it was work was
that done by our Appropriations Committee. I get that. I understand that. But
it was not available in sufficient time for anybody who did not help write it
to pick it up and read it start to finish before they voted on it. That’s
something we promised in 2010: If you give us the majority, we’re going to read
the bills and we’re going to give sufficient time for people to read the bills.
But as I talked to people on the House floor yesterday and I asked: "Did
you read this exception that got added to the Yoho bill?" Most of the
people did know there was an exception. [They said,] "no, I’ve read it;
there wasn’t an exception." Well, yes there was an exception. My staff had
printed it out for me from the Rules Committee’s website of what they actually
approved to go to the floor. I was wanting an actual copy to be made available
for members on Thursday, but there were no such copies of the amendment in the
nature of a substitute made available to members.
During the Rules Committee
hearing at which Chairman Rep.
Pete Sessions (R-TX) made the changes to the original Yoho bill via the
amendment in the nature of a substitute on behalf of McCarthy and Boehner,
Sessions made a crucial mistake during a back-and-forth with amnesty advocate
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).
In the hearing, Pete
Sessions said that House Republicans “intend to push a bill” in the next
Congress that would in effect create a legal open borders situation “that would
operate under the activity of trying to do under rule of law.”
“What we would do in the
House, move to the Senate, move to the President – and Mr. [Bob] Goodlatte [the
Judiciary Committee chairman] is committed in his job to do the right thing and
to work with the Administration,” Pete Sessions said. “But that, even in our
wildest dream, would not be to remove any person that might be here unless they
were dangerous to this country and committed a crime; and we would not even –
that was never even in a plan that I thought about.”
A moment later, Pete
Sessions further described his plans as pure open borders where anyone who
wants to come to America to take U.S. jobs from anywhere in the world can do
so. “I’m going to use my assets and resources in the new year to work with this
Congress, including [Democratic Rep. Jared] Polis [of Colorado], to have a well
understood agreement about what the law should be, and how we as communities,
and farm communities, and tech communities create circumstances where we can
have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote
‘thrown out’ or ‘deported;’ where we do keep families together, but what we do
is we do so under a rule of law of an understanding,” Pete Sessions said.
Pete Sessions, a top
ally of Speaker Boehner’s who runs the Rules Committee which has enormous power
over the legislative process in the House by setting the terms of debate of
legislation on the House floor, survived a primary challenge earlier this year
from conservative Republican Katrina Pierson. Pierson, a Tea Party activist and
first-time congressional candidate, got into the race a bit late and didn’t
have a ton of money—and despite a drubbing in the liberal media over some
things from her past, managed to garner 36 percent of the vote in the primary.
Videos that broke via Breitbart Texas in the days right before the primary showed
Pete Sessions supports amnesty for illegal aliens so he can “accommodate” them,
something Pierson hammered him over. Pierson told Breitbart News in response to
Sessions’ latest pro-amnesty and open borders comments during the recent Rules
Committee hearing to push through Yoho’s bill that she’s considering another
run against him in 2016—something that, assuming she has the funding up front,
she could give Sessions a much more organized run for his money this time
around.
"If we have a
country left come 2016, and Pete Sessions is still in office, I may consider
another run,” Pierson said in an email.
The plan Pete Sessions
said he’ll be backing with all his power seems to be emerging in the House.
Reuters on Sunday published an exclusive report detailing how GOP
leadership is coalescing behind a plan amounting to amnesty for millions of
illegal aliens; it would first start with a border security bill but “may lead
to other steps the House of Representatives could contemplate to repair parts
of U.S. immigration law.”
Ingraham suggested on her
radio program on Friday that Pete Sessions’ stance for open borders as he laid
out during that Rules Committee hearing is an indication he may be doing
consulting work for Central American nations seeking to send more of their
citizens to the United States legally or illegally.
“Is Pete Sessions
working with Guatemala and Honduras to bring more people into the country?”
Ingraham asked. “You might as well be. He's putting a welcome mat for anyone
who wants to come into this country illegally today.”
Ingraham challenged Pete
Sessions to come on her program to discuss his immigration stance, “to see if
he'll have a conversation with me about what they're planning to do with this
immigration reform, what they're planning to do to sell out American worker.”
What House leadership is
planning to introduce early this coming week, and to push for a vote on
sometime this week, is a plan that funds all of government except for the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the end of the 2015 fiscal year
in September. It splits DHS funding off into a shorter term bill that ends
sometime in March, giving off the impression that the new Republican U.S.
Senate and emboldened House GOP majority will fight the funding for Obama’s
amnesty then.
Even so, Boehner has not
pledged he will fight it then—and most conservatives believe that he will avoid
the battle at that time especially after what Boehner’s allies did to get the
Yoho bill passed—and the lengths to which Boehner’s lieutenants are going to
mislead the Republican conference and the American people about the nature of
blocking funding for Obama’s amnesty.
House Appropriations
Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) has been chief among those using the
factually incorrect argument that Congress can’t block funding for Obama’s
amnesty because the agency that is handling it, the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS), is funded primarily by fees. The nonpartisan
Congressional Research Service (CRS) thoroughly debunked Rogers’ claims that
Congress can't block this funding because of the fee-based structure of USCIS
in a report compiled for incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Jeff
Sessions (R-AL). But Rogers continues to peddle the falsehood in public more
than a week after CRS proved him wrong, telling Fox News’ Chad Pergram for an
article published late last week that Congress can’t block the funding.
“There’s nothing more
that I would like to do than defund USCIS,” Rogers claimed to Pergram. “I wish
I could but we have to find another way to do what we want to do.”
Ingraham has vowed to
seek a suitable primary challenger to Rogers in this upcoming election cycle,
something that the United Kentucky Tea Party says they’re working on looking for—broken
exclusively by Breitbart News then subsequently highlighted by the New York
Times. The vows to seek a Rogers primary challenger come after a Breitbart News
investigation which discovered
his campaign contributor General Dynamics is seeking the contract to print all
the work permits, Social Security cards, and other documents Obama plans to give
illegal aliens under the executive amnesty, and that the company expects to do
so at a facility inside Rogers’ congressional district in Corbin, Kentucky,
should it get the contract.
Rep. Mick Mulvaney
(R-SC) is quoted opposite Rogers in Pergram’s piece, noting that Republican
National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus promised to block the funding
for Obama’s amnesty if voters delivered the GOP the U.S. Senate majority, as
they did, and that Boehner’s team said they would fight Obama’s amnesty “tooth
and nail.”
“I’m not happy,”
Mulvaney said. “Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus said we were going
to do everything we can to fight the president. The Speaker and his spokesman
said we were going to fight it ‘tooth and nail. To defund would be fighting
tooth and nail. I can understand going home and saying we tried and it didn’t
work. But we have to at least try.”
Gohmert said that what
the House should do is pass a short-term Continuing Resolution—killing the
omnibus appropriations bill altogether—with the language blocking Obama’s
amnesty in it. That's something Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the incoming chairman of
the Senate Steering Committee, has pushed for too.
“I think we ought to do
a short-term CR but include the defund language in it,” Gohmert said. “That’s
what we ought to do next week. And when I say ‘short-term’ I don’t mean March.
As you know, the president’s already got a facility in Virginia and is hiring a
thousand people to start issuing those permits. This can’t wait until March. We
have to do this now. And I do want to mention if this president worked as
diligently and faithfully on helping our veterans and helping those trapped in
Benghazi as he has rushing in to getting these permits issued for people
illegally here, this country would be a lot better off.”
The Yoho bill was
designed to let Republicans “vent their frustrations with President Obama's
unilateral move,” The Hill’s Cristina Marcos wrote, with the goal being it will allow Boehner to
tamp down opposition to the omnibus bill from within his own party. Rep. Matt
Salmon (R-AZ) said it would less expensive and just as effective for House
Republicans to "send the president a Hallmark card saying we don't like
your immigration ideas."
Boehner knows he may
need Democrat votes to pass the omnibus spending bill, and, according to
several reports last week, his leadership team met with top Democrats including
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer—Pelosi’s right-hand man—to work out a deal to
get Democrats to back the plan. But with this development—that Boehner and his
allies substantively altered the cover vote bill in a way that helps the legal
argument for Obama’s amnesty—there may be enough Republican opposition that
develops in the coming days to derail Boehner’s plans once again.
Gohmert notes there are
quite a bit of similarities between this fight right now and the fight right
before the August recess in the House over whether to send Obama more money for
the border crisis or whether to block funding for his first executive amnesty,
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“This reminds me of what
happened this summer when we had a good group of Republicans who put together
the points that we believed in, the principles that we believed in about border
security and immigration,” Gohmert said.
They put together some
very good principles that we all as Republicans in the House agreed on. Then
the Speaker assured everybody that we had a bill getting drafted up that
incorporated those principles. I asked to get the name or names of those who
were drafting the bill to encapsulate those principles and I was not given the
name or names. I expressed concern that it might be the person that Mr. Boehner
hired from John McCain’s office who had worked on amnesty for John McCain. I
was called down for that. But I knew that the Judiciary Committee which has
general oversight over immigration did not do the bill. I knew that the
immigration subcommittee did not do the bill. And so I never could find out who
actually drafted it. And so they had a Whip Team going around asking people,
asking Republicans, "will you vote for the new border bill that
encapsulates all our principles that we agreed to unanimously?" Well, they
whipped the bill without anyone ever seeing the bill.
Because members were
telling leadership they would support the border crisis principles—but were
unclear what was in the actual legislation—leadership’s plan fell apart hours
before the vote. It was Scalise’s first massive failure as Majority Whip
because leadership thought they had the votes to pass the bill but, at the last
minute, had to cancel the scheduled vote and keep Congress in for an extra day
before the August recess.
“So they had a good whip
count on Tuesday of the last week of July without anyone ever seeing the
bill—and I didn’t get it until Tuesday night, my staff got it that afternoon,”
Gohmert said.
I read it that Tuesday
night and finished about 2 a.m., then laid down and got back up at 5 a.m. and
re-read it and knew that it was as bad as I thought it was the first time I
read it. Wednesday was all about trying to let our members know that this bill
does not encompass our principles. In fact, it does just the contrary. Once
enough people were able to look at it, they said, "wait, I can’t support
this. I didn’t agree to that." Then the Speaker went from having the votes
to pass to not having the votes to pass it. We were able to back off and sit
down and a number of us cleaned up the parts that were de facto amnesty. By
Friday night around 10 p.m., we were able to pass a decent border bill. But
this seems a little bit along those same lines—that "gee, we’re going to
get people to commit to pass a bill without ever seeing what it is that we’re
going to pass."
After the House got
together around the conservative bill—from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Marsha
Blackburn (R-TN)—the Democrats melted down entirely on the House floor. The
sergeant-at-arms had to remove an unhinged Pelosi, who chased Rep. Tom Marino
(R-PA) across the floor of the House, wagging her finger in his face in anger.
Yoho’s office even says
his bill wasn’t enough.
“Rep. Yoho would
absolutely support legislation that goes after funding,” Yoho’s spokesman
Kaveney said. “Again, we are simply tackling this from a different angle.
Everyone was talking about funding. Rep. Yoho wanted to try something
different. In addition to, not instead of.”
While it remains to be
seen what exactly will go down, Gohmert said the Democrats will likely come
even more unhinged than Pelosi's midsummer performance if Republicans buck
Boehner’s CR-omnibus strategy next week.
“If we do what we should
next week, and stand firm on our convictions, we might get to see former
Speaker Pelosi chase Tom Marino and maybe someone else up the aisle,” Gohmert
joked at the end of the interview.
In the meantime,
Senator-elect Tom Cotton (R-AR)—currently a House GOP member—is urging
Americans to burn down Congress’s phone lines in the effort to blow up
Boehner’s plans to back Obama’s amnesty.
“Call your Congressman
and call your Senator,” Cotton said on Ingraham’s radio program on
Friday.
I assure you having been
in the Congress that Congressmen and Senators listen when the people they
serve, their bosses, are calling them and asking them to vote in a certain way.
I can assure you, and it’s been the case on immigration before. In 2007,
there were reports that the Capitol switch board actually stopped working
because so many people called, and asked their Senators and Congressmen to stop
an amnesty bill going through at the time, and it stopped. And it helped in
2013 when the House was on the verge of considering something like the Gang of
Eight bill in the Senate, so I would encourage you to call your Senator, call
your Congressman next week and in the new year.
And on Fox News on Sunday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—the incoming
chairman of the Budget Committee—said that “there is no way” any members of the
House or Senate will be able to actually read “this huge bill” when leadership
introduces it. Leadership has been keeping the omnibus secret until now and,
still as of Sunday evening, hasn’t introduced it.
“There’s going to be
thousands of pages passed maybe Monday night in the House,” Sessions
said.
But what we do know is
it will allow the president to move money around and fund his executive amnesty
program. We just discovered last week that they were renting a building across
the river here Crystal City [Virginia] hiring a thousand people to process
these identifications of illegal people. They’ll be given a photo ID, a Social
Security number, allowed to participate in Social Security and Medicare, and be
able to work anywhere in America taking any job in America—we don’t have enough
jobs today, so this will be 5 million more people. So I was hoping and still
hope that the House will put real language in their bill that controls that.
Some say it can’t be done, but it was done on Guantanamo for years now. We have
refused to fund and provide the president money to close Guantanamo because it
would result in a release of dangerous terrorists.
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