OPINION:
We’ve been told that Congress must enact amnesty to bring millions of illegal aliens “out of the shadows.” But they’re no longer in the shadows, nor even in the shade, but openly rallying in Lafayette Park across from the White House, demanding that President Obama use his pen and his telephone to give them what they want.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress is scrambling to get out of town Thursday for a five-week summer holiday. Congress is grappling with an emergency funding bill to address the surge of aliens swarming the border. A bill by House Republicans would provide less than $1 billion in stopgap spending through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, far less than $3.7 billion requested by the president.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis of Mr. Obama’s spending request found that only $25 million of it would actually be spent by the end of the fiscal year, so Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, sensibly observes that there’s no need to rush the bill.
Mr. Sessions is equally concerned with President Obama’s attempt to unilaterally grant amnesty, insisting the president must be checked. “Our response now is of great import,” he said, urging his colleagues to require any border spending bill to include barring Mr. Obama from granting executive amnesty that “will define the scope of executive and congressional powers for years to come.”
Warning of “exceedingly dangerous waters” and a constitutional crisis if the president proceeds, Mr. Sessions says stopping him would be for Mr. Obama’s own good “because it will stop him from taking a step that will mar permanently his presidency and the office of the president.”
In language that sounds like it’s directed at Democrats standing for election in November, who are encouraging the president’s lawlessness, or at least not saying anything about it, Mr. Sessions predicts there will be a price to pay. The American people, he said, “will not sit back and allow Obama to implement through unlawful fiat what they have defeated through the democratic process.” They won’t retreat to the shadows themselves on Election Day.
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