Immigration Clash Could Lead to Shutdown

New York Times

By Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis

August 27, 2014

Immigration Clash Could Lead to Shutdown 

WASHINGTON — As President Obama nears a decision on taking broad executive action to reshape the nation’s immigration system, Republicans are threatening to force a confrontation over what they describe as a power grab by refusing to finance some or all of the moves.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, has said his party could seek to prevent Mr. Obama from taking unilateral action on immigration by removing the funding for it in the annual budget, which will be the top order of business when Congress returns from its break and must be passed by the end of September.

Injecting the immigration issue into the annual budget discussions raises the possibility of a spending stalemate that could lead to another government shutdown in the fall. Such a confrontation would pose a risk for both parties: Republicans were largely blamed for the shutdown last year, and many Democrats are wary of an immigration vote just before they face voters in November.

“There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a continuing resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote on this,” Mr. Rubio said Tuesday in an interview with Breitbart, a conservative website. “I’m interested to see what kinds of ideas my colleagues have about using funding mechanisms to address this issue.”

Republican leaders in the House and Senate say they have no intention of shutting down the government just weeks before the midterm elections. But the conservatives who are the most passionate opponents of any immigration action could press the issue when lawmakers return.

“If the president wields his pen and commits that unconstitutional act to legalize millions, I think that becomes something that is nearly political nuclear,” said Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, according to The Des Moines Register. “I think the public would be mobilized and galvanized, and that changes the dynamic of any continuing resolution and how we might deal with that.”

Democrats have eagerly seized on the possibility of a shutdown fight, predicting Wednesday that voters will punish Republican candidates if the party uses the budget negotiations to block an immigration overhaul.

“They’re willing to treat people who simply want to make a better way of life for themselves and their families inhumanely and use their Tea Party ideology to beat the president into submission if they don’t get their way,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.

At the same time, Democratic candidates for the Senate have urged Mr. Obama to delay any sweeping action on immigration. Democrats campaigning for re-election in conservative states worry that the president could fire up conservative voters if he acts unilaterally.

One of those senators, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, said the president’s  frustration with Republicans who oppose an immigration overhaul did not give him “carte blanche authority to sidestep Congress when he doesn’t get his way.”

White House officials said they had no intention of letting Republicans’ threats influence the timing or substance of an immigration announcement from Mr. Obama. The president has promised to reveal his intentions soon. He has said he is considering a unilateral move because of the refusal of the Republican-controlled House to pass an overhaul of the immigration system.

If Republicans were to force a shutdown over the issue, it “would put not just their efforts to take the Senate, but potentially their efforts to keep the House, in great danger,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Rubio said in a letter to Mr. Obama on Tuesday that he was “increasingly alarmed” by reports that the president could remove the threat of deportation for millions of illegal immigrants without consulting Congress.

“If indeed you move forward on such a decision, I believe it will close the door on any chance of making progress on immigration reform in the foreseeable future,” Mr. Rubio said in the letter.

Aides to the senator said he was not advocating a government shutdown to protest the president’s immigration actions. But they said that Mr. Rubio would want, and expect, a vote on any presidential immigration action to come up during the budget debate.

What could happen next is uncertain. In 2013, Republican leaders in the House and Senate said they did not want the new health care law to lead to a government shutdown. But several conservative lawmakers had other ideas, and the resulting stalemate closed the government for 15 days last fall.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said he hoped that Republicans “wouldn’t do the same thing again, to shut down the government over a common-sense, bipartisan effort to try to mitigate at least some of the worst problems that are caused by our broken immigration system.”

Mr. Earnest said the president would not think twice about taking executive action on immigration because of the Republican threats. “The president is determined to act where House Republicans won’t,” he said.

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