If President Barack Obama goes ahead with his plan on immigration reform, then one “I” may trigger the other “I”: impeachment.
This new round of threats come as a result of the president’s defense of his plans on immigration, announced last Sunday on television, when he stated that he had waited long enough for Congress to act.
On “Face the Nation,” Obama said, “Everybody agrees the immigration system’s broken. And we’ve been talking about it for years now in terms of fixing it.” Adding, “We don’t have the capacity to deport 11 million people—everybody agrees on that.”
The president was referencing the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, who are at the center of this endless debate about how to move them toward citizenship.
Speaker John Boehner, responding to the possibility of the president exercising his executive authority, warned “that unilateral action by the president on executive amnesty will erase any chances of doing immigration reform and will also make it harder for Congress and the White House to work together successfully on other areas where there might otherwise be common ground.”
After a presidential luncheon Friday, Boehner, along with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the presumed majority leader of the Senate next year, was even more outspoken about any such notion from the president, given the takeover of Congress by the Republicans.
Obama’s plan had a cautionary tone in which his authority would quickly be set aside the minute Congress passed a bill that addresses the problems of immigration reform. “I will sign it and it supersedes whatever actions I take,” he said during the interview. “And I’m encouraging them to do so.”
The president’s proposed action has renewed talks about impeachment that has been a mantra from the right since he won the election 2008. Mainly, this initiative has come from the tea party quarters, where a tea party website has gathered more than a half million signers calling for the impeachment of the president.
But with their increased power in Congress, Republicans will probably center their attention on the Affordable Care Act, particularly the tax credit subsidies element that may be heard soon by the Supreme Court. This situation is made more complicated with the dominance of Republican governors, many of whom have refused to provide the insurance exchanges for their states, leaving it up to the federal government. More on this later.
