Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act of 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support Mr. Yoho's important bill, the Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act of 2014.
President Obama has just announced one of the biggest constitutional power grabs ever by a President. He has declared unilaterally that, by his own estimation, more than 4 million unlawful immigrants will be free from the legal consequences of their lawless actions.
Not only that, he will, in addition, bestow upon them gifts such as work authorization and other immigration benefits. This despite the fact that President Obama has stated, over 20 times in the past, that he does not have the constitutional power to take such steps on his own and has repeatedly stated, ``I'm not a king.''
Pursuant to article I, section 8, of the Constitution, only Congress has the power to write immigration laws. Our Founding Fathers established this separation of powers to prevent tyranny. As James Madison wrote:
No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty than that ..... the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
President Obama is, in effect, rewriting our immigration laws by granting deferred action to more than 4 million unlawful aliens.
Pursuant to article II, section 3, of the Constitution, the President is required to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed''; yet President Obama is refusing to enforce our immigration laws for these millions of unlawful aliens.
President Obama justifies his actions by claiming that his administration is merely exercising the power of prosecutorial discretion; yet as Clinton administration INS Commissioner Doris Meissner told her agency, ``Exercising prosecutorial discretion does not lessen the INS' commitment to enforce the immigration laws to the best of our ability.''
While previous Presidents have provided immigration relief to groups of aliens, usually their actions were based on emergencies in foreign countries, thereby relying upon the broad constitutional power given to a President to conduct foreign affairs.
Without any such foreign crisis and in granting deferred action to a totally unprecedented number of aliens, President Obama has clearly exceeded his constitutional authority.
I commend Mr. Yoho for introducing his bill, which undoes the damage to our constitutional system that President Obama's actions are causing. The bill reaffirms the constitutional principles that only Congress has the power to write immigration laws and that the President must enforce those laws.
Mr. Yoho's bill prevents President Obama or any future President from exempting or deferring the removal of categories of unlawful aliens, except to the extent that the President is relying on his constitutional powers over foreign affairs or utilizing exceptions provided for in the bill for exceptional humanitarian and law enforcement circumstances.
The bill prevents President Obama or any future President from considering such aliens to be lawfully present in the United States and thus ineligible for the rights and privileges available to lawfully present aliens.
It prevents President Obama or any future President from granting work authorization to such aliens.
Finally, the bill takes effect as if enacted on November 20, 2014, thus nullifying the President's recent executive actions. I, again, urge my colleagues to vote for this necessary bill.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to clarify a couple of things.
First of all, it is not true that the House of Representatives has not acted to fix our broken immigration system. First of all, last summer, we passed two bills, one from the Appropriations Committee and one under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, that did just that, that provided resources to secure our borders to stop the surge of illegal immigrants coming into our country and make sure that the similarly unconstitutional DACA program that the President implemented earlier was frozen and could not proceed further. So, to me, that is simply not true.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. GOODLATTE. I yield myself an additional 15 seconds to say that the fact of the matter is that when you talk about taxes, there is no requirement in the President's executive order that anyone who qualifies as an unlawful alien must get this administrative legalization to pay back taxes. There is none.
They have to pay taxes moving forward, but one of the benefits is they qualify for the earned income tax credit. So this could cost the taxpayers of the country even more.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.
I would point out that the Supreme Court decision in Heckler v. Chaney in no way justifies the claim that the President of the United States has this authority to issue this enormous order.
Nor do we have a situation where it could justifiably be found that the agency has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.
That is what has happened here. The President has abdicated his statutory responsibilities in enforcing the law and changed the law, and that is why it cannot be upheld.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.
Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to me to see former President Ronald Reagan, especially here in the House Chamber. I, in fact, voted for President Reagan twice and was proud to support him.
One of the things that I remember most about President Reagan was that great debate with his opponent in one of the Presidential debates in which he said, ``There he goes again,'' pointing out when his opponent said something inaccurate about him.
Well, there they go again because what we have today is something that is very, very different than what President Reagan did. President Reagan signed a law--a bill passed by the Congress and signed it into law, and then he found some things that he didn't think were correct, so he then took action.
In today's Washington Post, which I would cite for the gentleman from Illinois, its headline, The Washington Post editorial today, ``An action without precedent,'' so when he cites President Reagan as a precedent here, The Washington Post clearly refutes that by pointing out how small that was and how it was done in response to a specific, identifiable concern about legislation that had been passed. Guess what? The Congress then subsequently fixed it as well.
That is not what is occurring here today, and as The Washington Post notes, it is plain that the White House's numbers--the 1.5 million claim--are indefensible, and it is similarly plain that the scale of Mr. Obama's move goes far beyond anything his predecessors attempted and without legislation that had been passed to found it upon.
No, this is power grab of enormous proportion. It is unconstitutional. It is clearly what he said he was going to do when he came to this body.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. GOODLATTE. I yield myself an additional 1 minute.
When he came to this body almost 3 years ago with his list of things that he wanted done, he said, ``If you don't do it, I will.'' On that occasion, some Members on that side of the aisle stood up and applauded.
Guess what? Since then, in health care reform, in the environment, in enforcement of our drug laws and in a whole host of other things, that is exactly what he has done, and he said he was going to do it. He said, ``I have my pen and my phone, and I will do it myself.''
Well, in this case, he has, on more than 20 occasions, said he did not have the authority to do it. Now, the folks on the other side of the aisle are saying, ``Oh, he didn't change the law.''
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. GOODLATTE. I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.
He didn't have the authority to change the law, but guess what? When he signed the order, here is what he said:
What you are not paying attention to is that I just took action to change the law.
To change the law. Article I of the Constitution says the law is only changed by the United States Congress. Article III says the President shall faithfully execute the law. His actions are unconstitutional and they are unprecedented.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, it has been said repeatedly that we need to do immigration reform, and I certainly don't disagree with that, but the United States Constitution says that immigration reform must be done by the United States Congress, and the President doesn't say, nor does the Constitution say, ``Hey, if the Congress doesn't do it or doesn't do it the way I like it, then I get the opportunity to do it myself.'' That is not what the Constitution says. It says the President shall faithfully execute the laws.
Now, the gentleman from New York, in talking about the impact of the President's executive action here says, ``Oh, the people who are here illegally and are taking jobs, they are taking jobs that Americans don't want.''
Well, maybe there is some truth to that, maybe some of them are not, but the fact of the matter is the President has unilaterally taken an executive order that would give every single one of the 4 million to 5 million undocumented people in the United States who take jobs, to take any job in the country they want to, as good a job, as high-paying a job as they want.
So, yes, we need to do immigration reform. The American people want us to do immigration reform, but they want us to start with enforcement first.
Instead, what the President has done, he has taken the law into his own hands. That is the real issue in this case and the real matter before the Congress and the real import of this legislation. It is not about where you are on immigration reform; it is about where you are on protecting the United States Constitution. Because this President's actions are unprecedented; this President's actions are beyond the pale; this President's actions are unconstitutional.
This legislation offered by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Yoho) stops that. That is why every Member of the House should support this good legislation and make sure that we preserve what we are sworn under an oath to preserve, and that is the Constitution of the United States.
Ladies and gentlemen, I urge adoption of this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, first, I want to thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Yoho), also the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Labrador) for the contribution he made to the language that is in this important bill to stop the President's unilateral action that is unconstitutional.
The gentleman offering the motion to recommit should note that the bill takes effect as if enacted on November 20, 2014. It nullifies the President's unlawful, unconstitutional executive order. It does not change all immigration law that provides already considerable statutory protection for our members of the Armed Forces of the United States and their families. It protects victims of domestic violence who successfully petition for relief; and Cuban nationals, as has been noted during the debate here, are already protected under the law, and this bill in no way, shape, or form harms any of those protections under the law.
I would urge my colleagues to oppose this motion to recommit and support the underlying legislation, which is needed to stop the unconstitutional actions of the President of the United States in writing an executive order that is unprecedented in its scope.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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