What was that again about how the Republican Party needs to reach out to the country’s growing Latino population? It turns out House Republicans want to reach out, all right:
The House voted Thursday morning to defund President Obama’s orders that allow officials to focus deportation efforts on illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes.
Republicans have argued that these orders amount to the selective enforcement of U.S. immigration laws that discourages enforcement against children who were brought to the United States illegally, or illegal immigrant adults who are not in any legal trouble. Many Republicans have dubbed Obama’s orders as “administrative amnesty.”
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) sponsored the amendment to the 2014 Department of Homeland Security spending bill, and called for its passage in late Wednesday debate by saying Obama’s orders — also known as the Morton memos — violate the Constitution.
“The point here is … the President does not have the authority to waive immigration law, nor does he have the authority to create it out of thin air, and he’s done both with these Morton memos in this respect,” King said.
King added that while the government has prosecutorial discretion, Obama does not have the authority to create classes of people who are exempt from the law through an executive order.
AND:
Democrats said King’s language is a “poison pill” that would not survive final passage, and that the Supreme Court has ruled that the executive branch has the right to prioritize cases through an order.
“So for the gentleman to argue that there is some constitutional infirmity with deferred action is wrong,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said in response to King’s arguments. “He’s wrong on the law. He’s wrong on his constitutional argument.”
The House agreed with King and voted in favor of his amendment in a mostly partisan 224-201 vote. That’s a smaller margin than the 238-175 vote in favor of the same language in 2012, when Republicans had a wider majority.
I added the boldface. The bottom line is that we are not seeing Republican “rebranding” but Republican brand CONFIRMATION. I would be surprised if Hispanic groups don’t try to get out the vote bigtime in perhaps one of the largest Hispanic turnouts in a non-Presidential election year to vote against the Republicans. Some GOPers may feel that in the end this won’t really be enacted and that it’s just pleasing the base. But this is the age of Twitter, Facebook, cell phones — and the word is going to get out. Can Republicans win elections without winning a bigger portion of the Hispanic vote? Perhaps. But they are making it much easier for Democrats to continue to paint the portrait they successfully painted among Latino voters in 2012 — and get many of them to the polls.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.