Posted on July 25, 2014

GOP Rank-and-File Discusses Ways to Take on Obama over Amnesty, Including Impeachment

Jonathan Strong, Breitbart, July 25, 2014

In a free-wheeling discussion that touched on dozens of proposals for how to address the tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children streaming across the southern U.S. borders, one thread connected the calls to add to or change a border crisis proposal from GOP leadership: President Barack Obama.

The proposals included trying to prevent a future executive amnesty by Obama, telling the president what he should do to enforce the law in a non-binding resolution, and even putting impeachment on the table.

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) told colleagues that the House should pass legislation with new steps to secure the border, and tell Obama if he didn’t implement it, they would impeach him.

“He either enforces the laws on the books — as he was hired and elected to do — or he leaves Congress no option. This is not our choice, this is the President’s choice and I would advise him to uphold the law on the books,” Yoho said in a written statement after the meeting.

“People were hissing at that because they don’t want to go there,” said a GOP member who was in the room.

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There were divergent views from lawmakers on whether the meeting produced a strong impetus to pass a bill in the House next week, with some lawmakers saying the conference had achieved a consensus on moving forward while critics of the border package raised questions about whether it could secure the necessary votes.

The discussion is, at this point, about optics, since it’s widely regarded that the House bill will not be enacted into law.

“Whatever we do, we gotta figure Reid isn’t going to go ahead with it, so basically it’s a message bill, well we’re going to go tell our constituents, ‘well here’s what we’ve done, Reid won’t do it.’ So this is kind of just political blame shifting,” said Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

One option discussed is a resolution outlining steps Obama should take to secure the border.

“Trent Franks mentioned he has a resolution that specifically lists all the ways the president has failed and invited the crisis, lists a number of things that the president could actually do to solve the crisis. I think there’s a lot of sense that that’s a good idea, right out of the gate, to do that. And then whatever you do after that, we’ll see,” DeSantis said.

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