Speaker John Bohner (R-OH) announced this afternoon that the House will not be voting on his $659 million border bill before adjourning for the August recess.
This is a wise decision since giving President Obama any additional funds for the border would just make it easier for him to enact his next unilateral amnesty.
Supposedly, Obama has the legal authority to grant temporary amnesty (aka "deferred action" or "non priority enforcement" status) to anyone he wants to, whenever he wants to, based on his inherent "prosecutorial discretion" as the nation's chief law enforcement officer.
Congress, this legal theory reasons, has not allocated the funds necessary to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants, so in order to conserve resources Obama must decide which of the 11 million illegal immigrants he will or will not deport. In this sense, true prosecutorial discretion should save the executive branch money.
But Obama's 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is an unprecedented abuse of that prosecutorial discretion. Obama isn't just deciding which illegal immigrants he will or will not pursue. He is also granting those that meet his made up criteria a special new status that also allows them to get work permits, a Social Security number, and a drivers license.
Setting up a new legalization program and adminsitering the many new rules for who does and does not qualify for that program costs a lot of money. But Congress never approved Obama's amnesty and never approved any money for it.
So where did Obama get this money? The New York Times reports:
Many thousands of Americans seeking green cards for foreign spouses or other immediate relatives have been separated from them for a year or more because of swelling bureaucratic delays at a federal immigration agency in recent months.
The long waits came when the agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifted attention and resources to a program President Obama started in 2012 to give deportation deferrals to young undocumented immigrants, according to administration officials and official data. …
Until recently, an American could obtain a green card for a spouse, child or parent — probably the easiest document in the immigration system — in five months or less. But over the past year, waits for approvals of those resident visas stretched to 15 months, and more than 500,000 applications became stuck in the pipeline, playing havoc with international moves and children’s schools and keeping families apart.
(emphasis added) In other words, Obama stole money from legal immigrants who played by the rules, and gave it to the illegal immigrants who benefitted from his DACA program.
If the House had approved Obama's $3.7 billion request for the border crisis he created, he could have just used that windfall to pay for his next unilateral amnesty.
But now that conservatives have blocked Obama's supplemental request, how will Obama pay for his next amnesty?
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