Utah Sen. Mike Lee, an outspoken conservative who has been highly critical of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration, said Tuesday that he expects Democrats in the Senate to join with the GOP in an effort to overturn actions protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Lee, who was recently named counselor to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, giving the first-term conservative senator a seat at the Republican leadership table, said he was pleased to see House Republicans already taking steps in the new Congress to undue the president’s immigration policies via the appropriations process for the Department of Homeland Security.
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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) last week unveiled a far-reaching proposal that would defund not just the president’s most recent action temporarily lifting the threat of deportation from several million illegal immigrants, but would go back to his 2012 order protecting children brought to the U.S. illegally as minors from deportation as well.
“We’re voting to block the president’s overreach, his executive overreach, which I believe is beyond his constitutional duty and frankly violates the Constitution itself,” Boehner said in a press conference Tuesday. “This is not about the issue of immigration. What it is, is about the president acting lawlessly.”
The proposal would almost certainly be vetoed by the president, but tying it to an appropriations bill complicates the issue, and Lee suggested it will get a warm reception in the Senate.
“I’m happy that they’re going after him,” Lee said. “I’m happy that they are taking a real hard look at what the president tried to do and what they can do to serve as a check on what many properly regard as an act of executive overreach.”
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Asked whether he anticipates his colleagues in the Senate to take similar steps he said he did – and that he expected to get support from Democrats.
“I expect Republicans will follow the same course and that some Democrats will be inclined to join with us,” he said.
How many Democrats?
“That’s the question,” said Lee. “The reason I say I expect some Democrats will end up joining with us is that this is not a clear cut, right down the middle split in terms of partisan affiliation. There is an instinct I think, on the part of many Democratic Senators to want to support the president because he’s a member of their political party. But this is an issue that really cuts across the traditional party lines to a degree.”
“Even among many who would support a full blown amnesty measure if introduced and passed by Congress and signed into law by the president - even among those voters – there’s a lot of reluctance on the part of a lot of Americans, a lot of discomfort with what the president has done. In other words, even if they like the policy outcome, they’re not comfortable with the way that outcome was achieved here.”
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Republicans prevailed last month in a move to fund the entire government, except for DHS, through the end of the fiscal year. Funding for the agency charged with implementing the President’s executive order on immigration, though, expires at the end of February.
Asked if he would support an effort to hold up funding for DHS if the president refused to sign off on a bill undoing his executive orders, Lee said the GOP isn’t looking to defund the agency, but has only so many means to challenge the president at its disposal.
“In this Congress, it’s probably the only way we might be able to stop him is through spending legislation,” he said. “And here we’ve got spending legislation specifically focused on the department that’s in charge of implementing the executive action.”
Would he support allowing DHS funding to expire in effort to pressure the president?
“We don’t want it to expire,” he said, “and that’s why we’re working on proposals to keep DHS funded while restricting the funds that the president may spend in furthering this executive action which we regard as unlawful.”
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