Top Senate Democrats are fed up with waiting for the House to take up comprehensive immigration reform. If Republicans don’t act in July, President Obama will, they warn. After all, he still has a pen and a phone, right?
By Hill: :
“We are at the end of the line,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-J.) said Thursday during a news conference on Capitol Hill. “We are not bluffing when we give them a legislative deadline to take action.
“Their first job is to govern,” Menendez added, “and in the absence of governance comes executive action.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) settled down. Noting that a year has passed since the Senate passed a sweeping immigration reform bill with broad bipartisan support, he called on House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to introduce a similar bill.
“I don’t know how much more time he thinks he needs, but I hope Speaker Boehner will speak up today,” Durbin said. “And if he fails to do so, the president will borrow the power needed to solve immigration problems.”
White House press secretary Josh Earnest agreed similar comments in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd:
“[W]“We are not just going to sit and wait forever for Congress,” he said. “We have been waiting for a year. “The president has tasked his Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, with reviewing the president’s options and what he has at his disposal using his executive authority to try to solve some of the problems that our broken immigration system has created.”
But given the current immigration crisis for unaccompanied children at the southwest border, Boehner says passing any legislation this year will only be more tough.
“The president is making this more and more difficult for us every day to try to deal with this in a responsible way,” Boehner said. “We are dealing with a humanitarian catastrophe at the border. In my opinion, most of them are the work of the president, which makes our job much more difficult because of the actions he has or has not taken regarding the border.”
