They warn that unilateral moves from Obama will 'inject serious constitutional questions.' Republicans slam immigration plans

Top House Republicans are hitting President Barack Obama over his impending executive action on immigration — again.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) warned Thursday that unilateral moves from Obama will “inject serious constitutional questions” into the broader immigration debate.


“It’s shocking that the White House now openly admits that President Obama is delaying his unilateral actions on immigration until after the November elections simply because of raw politics,” Boehner and Goodlatte said. “Whether before or after the election in November, it is never acceptable for the president to rewrite our laws by executive decree — the Constitution does not give him the authority to do so.”

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What sparked Thursday’s remarks from the two powerful House Republicans were comments earlier this week from White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who said the administration was concerned that if Obama had gone ahead with his planned executive action, immigration could become a casualty of election-year politics.

“I guess the concern is that, had the president moved forward with his announcement prior to Election Day, you would have seen Republican candidates do more to make the immigration issue central to their campaign,” Earnest said. “And in the event that they were successful in their campaign, the concern would be that they would cite their opposition to immigration reform as a reason for their success.

“That is not a story line that the president wanted or that anybody here wanted to contribute to,” Earnest added.

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Republicans such as Boehner, Goodlatte, and others on Capitol Hill have long pressed Obama against acting unilaterally on immigration — a promise that the president made after the GOP-led House failed to act on immigration reform this year.

Goodlatte, who as Judiciary Committee chairman oversees immigration policy in the House, also warned in a C-Span interview last month that the House may invoke another lawsuit against Obama if he moves to halt deportations and give work permits to immigrants here illegally without the formal blessing of Congress. The GOP-controlled House already authorized a lawsuit against Obama earlier this year over the administration’s unilateral delays in the health care law.

After holding off on issuing new executive actions on immigration last month, the White House has pledged to move on its own on immigration by the end of the year — actions that could affect potentially millions of undocumented immigrants. Obama repeated that pledge to a crowd of Latino officials last week at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala.