During an appearance on Matt Murphy’s Birmingham-area conservative talk radio program Friday morning, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said that he believes Obama’s refusal to enforce U.S. immigration laws should be part of the lawsuit being brought against him by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
The House Speaker in mid-July filed suit against the president for not carrying out his constitutional duty to enforce the law. However, the lawsuit was narrowly defined to focus solely on his decision to defer the employer mandate of ObamaCare.
“Congressman Mo Brooks made the point that he would have liked to see the House of Representatives file a lawsuit against the amnesty proposal, as opposed to ObamaCare,” Murphy told Sessions. “He thinks that is perhaps a more direct violation of his oath of office.”
Sessions agreed, and urged his fellow Senators to follow the House’s lead and block federal money from being spent “to carry out any form of executive amnesty.”
“[I]t’s a total overreach,” said Sessions. “Some of it’s already been done, therefore the House really – if they’re going to file a lawsuit challenging constitutional overreach, it definitely should be part of their lawsuit.”
“But Congress has certain powers,” he continued. “What the House did, as I suggested and a lot of their members strongly supported, was to put in language that said not one dime of federal money can be expended by the president to carry out any form of executive amnesty or work authorization for people unlawfully in the United States. We do that all the time. We barred the president from spending anymore closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. That’s been done hundreds, thousands of times. That’s a constitutional power that Congress has. The House has done it, so now it’s up to the Senate.”
U.S. Congress is currently in the first week of a five-week recess.
Before leaving town, the Republican-controlled House, in an effort led by the Alabama delegation, passed two bills to address the current immigration crisis.
The first was an updated immigration enforcement bill that conservatives say was greatly strengthened by the addition of language written by Alabama Congressman Robert Aderholt. The second bill blocked executive action on immigration. The second bill likely would not have existed at all had the Alabama delegation not insisted on it.
The Democratic-controlled Senate did not pass any immigration legislation before leaving town.
(h/t Breitbart)
RELATED: While the rest of the Senate is on vacation, Sessions continues fight against executive amnesty
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