KHH1

By ASHLEY PARKERJAN. 9, 2015

WASHINGTON — House Republicans introduced legislation Friday that would drastically roll back President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, including a provision that will allow five million undocumented immigrants to live in the country and one that protects young people brought to the United States illegally by a parent.

The measure, an effort to appease their more conservative members, would still finance most of the Department of Homeland Security.

The core of the bill provides $39.7 billion for homeland security, a $400 million increase from the previous fiscal year. House Republicans plan to offer an amendment to the legislation that will prevent any money — both under the appropriations process and through any fees collected from immigration applications — from being used to implement any of the president’s existing executive actions on immigration.

The plan Republicans ultimately supported, after a week of private meetings and behind-the-scenes discussions, is far more expansive than what the House leadership team had originally anticipated. The Department of Homeland Security runs out of funds at the end of February.
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Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, leaving a closed-door meeting in Washington on Friday. Republicans held private meetings through the week to discuss how to reverse President Obama's immigration plans.Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
The repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected the so-called dreamers under Mr. Obama’s 2012 order, could prove particularly contentious; roughly a dozen Republicans in a closed-door meeting Friday objected to such an expansive approach. The bill is unlikely to pass the Senate and the president has also threatened to veto the legislation.

The v**e served as a signal of how far House Republicans, emboldened by their midterm e******n victory, would go to confront Mr. Obama. It is a move that carries peril because the provision related to the dreamers had broad appeal in the Latino community, an increasingly influential v****g bloc.

Representative Matt Salmon, Republican of Arizona, said that the most conservative members supported the plan and that a handful of the more moderate members expressed concern.

“I think the direct phraseology was, ‘We were hoping it would be more of a rifle shot. This is more expansive,’ Mr. Salmon said. But, he added, “This is as close to one hundred percent as we’ve ever gotten on a tough issue like this.”

The Republican plan also would reign in several 2011 memos by the administration — known as the Morton memos — that significantly expanded the factors that immigration authorizes could consider when deciding to defer or cancel deportations.

And it would increase funds for the federal Secure Communities program. Under the Secure Communities program, fingerprints of every individual booked by police were checked against Homeland Security databases, leading immigration authorities to initiate many deportations. The program has faced growing resistance from immigrant advocates and states. It was canceled by the president.

During the appropriations process at the end of last year, House Republicans had insisted on offering only short-term funding for the homeland security agency, in order to give themselves leverage to revisit the issue this year, when they control both chambers and believe they are in a better position to fight the president on his immigration directives.

“The American people were expecting the leadership to step up to the plate and not just make some kind of symbolic gesture in trying to address what the president did back in November, but try to go a step further,” said Representative Robert B. Aderholt, Republican of Alabama and a member of the House Appropriations Committee. “That’s what our language does, and what at the end of the day will garner a lot of support from our colleagues.”

The House expects to v**e on the bill next Tuesday or Wednesday, before congressional Republicans head out of town for a retreat in Hershey, Pa.

However, the Senate is unlikely to pass the House’s initial legislative offering, and Mr. Obama is all but certain to veto it — setting up a showdown that could hold up financing for the entire department. Republicans on Friday were clear that they did not want to risk a shutdown of the homeland security agency, forcing them to straddle a risky balance between funding most of the department while also stripping out money for the president’s unilateral immigration actions.

“We have to DHS funded, it’s as simple as that,” said Peter T. King, Republican of New York.

Democrats and immigration activists, meanwhile, were outraged, vowing to fight the Republican proposal.
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“Join me and urge the speaker to refrain from serving red meat to the crowd by attaching defunding executive order language to the Homeland funding bill,” Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, wrote to colleagues. “Doing so is setting up another manufactured crisis on our national security, terrorism prevention and border security management.”

Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy organization, criticized House Republican leadership for allowing itself to be swayed by the conference’s most conservative members. It warned that the new proposal could have negative ramifications among Hispanic v**ers in the 2016 p**********l e******n.

“It is outrageous and it is noteworthy that the House leadership has embraced the most extreme proposals from the most extreme members of their caucus,” Mr. Sharry said. “It is nothing short of breathtaking that this is their first move coming out of the box in 2015 when they get the reigns of power.”

Loki Loc: Georgia

It is also outrageous that Obama implemented this EO after stating publically at least 22 times that he did not have the Constitutional authority to do so..

KHH1

He issued a Memorandum, not an EO.*


Obama issues 'executive orders by another name'

Gregory Korte, USA TODAY 1:16 p.m. EST December 17, 2014

President Obama has issued a form of executive action known as the p**********l memorandum more often than any other president in history - using it to take unilateral action even as he has signed fewer executive orders. VPC

By issuing his directives as "memoranda" rather than executive orders, Obama has downplayed the extent of his executive actions.


WASHINGTON — President Obama has issued a form of executive action known as the p**********l memorandum more often than any other president in history — using it to take unilateral action even as he has signed fewer executive orders.

When these two forms of directives are taken together, Obama is on track to take more high-level executive actions than any president since Harry Truman battled the "Do Nothing Congress" almost seven decades ago, according to a USA TODAY review of p**********l documents.

Obama has issued executive orders to give federal employees the day after Christmas off, to impose economic sanctions and to determine how national secrets are classified. He's used p**********l memoranda to make policy on gun control, immigration and labor regulations. Tuesday, he used a memorandum to declare Bristol Bay, Alaska, off-limits to oil and gas exploration.


Like executive orders, p**********l memoranda don't require action by Congress. They have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching. And some of the most significant actions of the Obama presidency have come not by executive order but by p**********l memoranda.

Obama has made prolific use of memoranda despite his own claims that he's used his executive power less than other presidents. "The t***h is, even with all the actions I've taken this year, I'm issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years," Obama said in a speech in Austin last July. "So it's not clear how it is that Republicans didn't seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did."

Obama has issued 195 executive orders as of Tuesday. Published alongside them in the Federal Register are 198 p**********l memoranda — all of which carry the same legal force as executive orders.

He's already signed 33% more p**********l memoranda in less than six years than Bush did in eight. He's also issued 45% more than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who assertively used memoranda to signal what kinds of regulations he wanted federal agencies to adopt.

Obama is not the first president to use memoranda to accomplish policy aims. But at this point in his presidency, he's the first to use them more often than executive orders.

"There's been a lot of discussion about executive orders in his presidency, and of course by sheer numbers he's had fewer than other presidents. So the White House and its defenders can say, 'He can't be abusing his executive authority; he's hardly using any orders," said Andrew Rudalevige, a presidency scholar at Bowdoin College. "But if you look at these other vehicles, he has been aggressive in his use of executive power."

So even as he's quietly used memoranda to signal policy changes to federal agencies, Obama and his allies have claimed he's been more restrained in his use of that power.

In a Senate floor speech in July, Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "While Republicans accuse President Obama of executive overreach, they neglect the fact that he has issued far fewer executive orders than any two-term president in the last 50 years."

The White House would not comment on how it uses memoranda and executive orders but has previously said Obama's executive actions "advance an agenda that expands opportunity and rewards hard work and responsibility."

"There is no question that this president has been judicious in his use of executive action, executive orders, and I think those numbers thus far have come in below what President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton did," said Jay Carney, then the White House press secretary, in February.

Carney, while critical of Bush's executive actions, also said it wasn't the number of executive actions that was important but rather "the quality and the type."

"It is funny to hear Republicans get upset about the suggestion that the president might use legally available authorities to advance an agenda that expands opportunity and rewards hard work and responsibility, when obviously they supported a president who used executive authorities quite widely," he said.

While executive orders have become a kind of Washington shorthand for unilateral p**********l action, p**********l memoranda have gone largely unexamined. And yet memoranda are often as significant to everyday Americans than executive orders. For example:

• In his State of the Union Address in January, Obama proposed a new retirement savings account for low-income workers called a MyRA. The next week, he issued a p**********l memorandum to the Treasury Department instructing it to develop a pilot program.

• In April, Obama directed the Department of Labor to collect salary data from federal contractors and subcontractors to monitor whether they're paying women and minorities fairly.

• In June, Obama told the Department of Education to allow certain borrowers to cap their student loan payments at 10% of income.

WhosetheBoss Loc: Arkansas

If they continue to refuse to seal our borders, then what is the point of having DHS, lets just close that worthless arm of our government and let the savings help cover the immigration cost's. Whats the point of DHS and border patrol otherwise??????

Caboose Loc: South Carolina

Very Good. I agree 100%. WE need to roll back all this clowns
executive orders.