How Boehner Tricked House Republicans Into Supporting Obama’s Amnesty Actions

Gohmert walked Breitbart News through the text of Section Three of the new bill line by line, explaining how each word fits into the legal patchwork of immigration law before getting to the key additions that were made without notifying many of the members who voted for it.

“They added another section called ‘exceptions.’ And the exceptions part says this ‘shall apply except’ and then there’s three parts,” Gohmert said while reading the actual text of the bill on the phone with Breitbart News.

The third one is “for humanitarian purposes where the aliens are at imminent risk of serious bodily harm or death.” That’s what they added. Well, this president has been arguing for months that the things he’s doing is because these people are at imminent risk of serious bodily harm and that’s why he’s doing them. So actually by adding this exception it gives the president for the first time a solid statutory basis to argue that providing those work permits is now legal.

Gohmert said that this addition gives President Obama a foot in the door for a legal argument justifying executive amnesty.

“By adding that exception to the original bill, we would now give the president the statutory authority to do what he’s doing to issue these work permits,” Gohmert said. “I know that this language is in there for people claiming asylum and for refugee status, but not ever for providing work permits. But by adding this to this bill that’s supposed to claim his effort to provide work permits is illegal, unconstitutional, and inappropriate, the exception that was added gives him a statutory basis for arguing his work permits are now statutorily allowed.”

“I understand that the president issued a veto threat if we were going to pass this, but I think that was to give this bill more credibility after this language was added,” Gohmert added. “I understand Harry Reid said he’s never going to take this up. But if Harry Reid took it and passed it in the Senate, and the president signed it, then I think it gives the president a statutory basis to argue he has the power to issue these work permits now.”

Gohmert says that even he doesn’t think that it should be interpreted as such—just that it gives the president something to lean on. “I don’t necessarily agree that this should be interpreted that this exception gives the president the authority to do what he’s done,” Gohmert said. “What I’m saying is this gives him the argument that it does.”

However, Yoho’s office challenges the assertion that this loophole that was inserted into his new bill—which his office does admit was an “alternative” bill, different than his original legislation—would give the president such a legal argument.

Yoho spokesman Brian Kaveney told Breitbart News that “that exception already exists under the Executive’s constitutional foreign affairs powers – Chinese in Tiananmen Square, Cubans in the 1960s, etc.”

“Obama is not using a humanitarian argument for his actions; he is citing prioritization and prosecutorial discretion for his legal bases,” Kaveney said.

Even if he were using a humanitarian argument, his actions would not fit these exceptions. Previous presidents simply granted voluntary departure to certain children and spouses to match congressional legislation – clearly much different than what Obama is attempting to do. Even Obama would have a hard time explaining how 5-8 million people, already here, are under threat of imminent risk of serious bodily harm or death. That exception was specifically written that way to pay respect to the foreign policy powers previously discussed but limit any other wild interpretation.

Yoho’s bill is the centerpiece of Boehner’s plan to pass a longterm CR-omnibus strategy that funds Obama’s executive amnesty until at least March 2015, and probably forever.

Nationally syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham cut Yoho to pieces in an interview last week in which Yoho had no idea how to explain what he was doing.

“Congressman, you know I like you,” she told him. “We’ve had you on before. But I’m just going to say it because I say the truth.”

“All right,” Yoho responded.

“I think you’re getting played here,” she said. “I really do.”

Congressman, you are giving the establishment the cover that they desperately crave because they know America is onto this. We’ve been played for fools before. “We’re going to fight for you, we’re going to stop this. Da da da. We have limited ability to do this. We don’t have Congress, we’re gonna wait until January to do this.” Then we find out it’s an omnibus spending bill that funds the whole government until the end of next summer, taking away a lot of opportunity to really hone in on those specifics. So my question here is a simple one, because I think you are one of our real hopes here—I really do.

“Well, I appreciate that,” Yoho interjected.

“In March, has Boehner guaranteed to you he will pick up where Jeff Sessions left off, because Sessions has the right play here—he knows how to deal with this,” Ingraham asked. “Has he pledged to you he will replace this bill with the Sessions bill?”

Yoho ducked in his response. “We haven’t gone that far,” he said. “And again, Laura, what we’re dealing with is crisis management up here. Over and over again.”

Gohmert said that it was House GOP leadership who made the changes to the Yoho legislation and they did so through the Rules Committee.

“All I know is that someone from our leadership sent the Rules Committee on Wednesday night, right before the Rules Committee met, emailed them this new version—the new version—of 5759 and so that’s what the Rules Committee took up late the night before, this amendment in the nature of a substitute,” Gohmert said when asked if he knows who made the specific alterations. “I don’t know who specifically sent it to Rules, but this was sent to Rules from someone in our leadership saying this is the new bill, it’s an amendment in the nature of a substitute and this is what we want to come to the floor tomorrow.”

“Normally it would be from either the Majority Leader’s office or the Speaker’s office,” Gohmert added when asked which person from GOP leadership would have done this. The Majority Whip Scalise’s role in this, Gohmert said, was whipping votes for the original—not the alternative—Yoho bill.

“We were being whipped—or asked if we were going to vote for the Yoho bill—a day before they even put this new language, the amendment in the nature of a substitute, up,” Gohmert said. “That went up on the Rules Committee website late on Wednesday night, but on Tuesday they were asking people if they were going to vote for the Yoho bill. They were doing a whip count. They were doing a whip count on the Yoho bill without people even knowing what they were going to be adding to it.”

Yoho’s office admits that other congressional offices were involved in the alterations to his legislation, but won’t name names. “A few conservative offices reached out to us regarding wanting to make language more explicit and make sure it statutorily makes sense,” Yoho spokesman Brian Kaveney said.

We also wanted to focus on the fact that this was an overreach. The humanitarian exception was added because given Rep. Yoho’s strong Constitutional views, we did not want our bill to overreach into the foreign affairs powers that presidents have (again, not saying we agree, but these powers have been affirmed by jurisprudence). Without this exception, we risked having a possible constitutional flaw that might have threatened the bill. That was a determination and decision that was made by our office, given Rep. Yoho’s Constitutional principles.

Kaveney has not responded to followup requests for comment to say which “conservative offices” were involved in these changes or if those “conservative offices” included anyone from leadership. It’s worth noting that Yoho did vote against Boehner for Speaker at the beginning of the last Congress and may do so again in the future.

Kaveney did, however, insist on making clear that Yoho’s original bill was his own creation—and something he took to leadership, not the other way around.

“We took this bill to leadership. Not the other way around. We are the ones who asked them to bring this on the floor,” Kaveney said.

Members were not provided the new text of the bill before they were asked to vote on it, either—something that should infuriate Americans, Gohmert said.

“I checked with the clerk before I left the House floor yesterday to see if there were any copies that were made available for members with these new changes on there,” Gohmert said.

The clerk said that they had to make the changes on their own copy but if someone wanted them to make them a copy, they’d certainly make them a copy—but they’d have to leave the floor and go into an adjoining office and make a copy. But the copies that were available did not have these changes in there. If you wanted to see this, you’d have to do it one of two ways—you’d have to know to go the Rules Committee website and download what they actually approved for the House floor very late Wednesday night. The only other way would be to go to the Clerk’s desk there right below the Speaker’s and say you would like a copy not of 5759, but of the amendment in the nature of a substitute. If you asked for the bill, you would get 5759—which we did not vote for. But if you asked for the amendment in the nature of the substitute, you would get the newly penciled language.

When asked if this is getting into “you have to pass it to find out what’s in it” territory—the famous line from then Speaker Nancy Pelosi about Obamacare—Gohmert said, “that’s what concerns me.” Gohmert said this bill and the recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was packed with legislative pork and federal land grab provisions, are violations of Republicans’ promises to the American people in the wake of Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare passage.

“There were not three days for members to review this language,” Gohmert said.

There were not three days to review the NDAA, and I voted against the NDAA because we didn’t know everything that was in it. That’s a big bill and it of course it is very important—and I didn’t have time to read it. It was again provided to Rules Committee the night before, and yes I understand that much of it was work was that done by our Appropriations Committee. I get that. I understand that. But it was not available in sufficient time for anybody who did not help write it to pick it up and read it start to finish before they voted on it. That’s something we promised in 2010: If you give us the majority, we’re going to read the bills and we’re going to give sufficient time for people to read the bills. But as I talked to people on the House floor yesterday and I asked: “Did you read this exception that got added to the Yoho bill?” Most of the people did know there was an exception. [They said,] “no, I’ve read it; there wasn’t an exception.” Well, yes there was an exception. My staff had printed it out for me from the Rules Committee’s website of what they actually approved to go to the floor. I was wanting an actual copy to be made available for members on Thursday, but there were no such copies of the amendment in the nature of a substitute made available to members.

During the Rules Committee hearing at which Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) made the changes to the original Yoho bill via the amendment in the nature of a substitute on behalf of McCarthy and Boehner, Sessions made a crucial mistake during a back-and-forth with amnesty advocate Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).

In the hearing, Pete Sessions said that House Republicans “intend to push a bill” in the next Congress that would in effect create a legal open borders situation “that would operate under the activity of trying to do under rule of law.”

“What we would do in the House, move to the Senate, move to the President – and Mr. [Bob] Goodlatte [the Judiciary Committee chairman] is committed in his job to do the right thing and to work with the Administration,” Pete Sessions said. “But that, even in our wildest dream, would not be to remove any person that might be here unless they were dangerous to this country and committed a crime; and we would not even – that was never even in a plan that I thought about.”

A moment later, Pete Sessions further described his plans as pure open borders where anyone who wants to come to America to take U.S. jobs from anywhere in the world can do so. “I’m going to use my assets and resources in the new year to work with this Congress, including [Democratic Rep. Jared] Polis [of Colorado], to have a well understood agreement about what the law should be, and how we as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote ‘thrown out’ or ‘deported;’ where we do keep families together, but what we do is we do so under a rule of law of an understanding,” Pete Sessions said.

Pete Sessions, a top ally of Speaker Boehner’s who runs the Rules Committee which has enormous power over the legislative process in the House by setting the terms of debate of legislation on the House floor, survived a primary challenge earlier this year from conservative Republican Katrina Pierson. Pierson, a Tea Party activist and first-time congressional candidate, got into the race a bit late and didn’t have a ton of money—and despite a drubbing in the liberal media over some things from her past, managed to garner 36 percent of the vote in the primary.

Videos that broke via Breitbart Texas in the days right before the primary showed Pete Sessions supports amnesty for illegal aliens so he can “accommodate” them, something Pierson hammered him over. Pierson told Breitbart News in response to Sessions’ latest pro-amnesty and open borders comments during the recent Rules Committee hearing to push through Yoho’s bill that she’s considering another run against him in 2016—something that, assuming she has the funding up front, she could give Sessions a much more organized run for his money this time around.

“If we have a country left come 2016, and Pete Sessions is still in office, I may consider another run,” Pierson said in an email.

The plan Pete Sessions said he’ll be backing with all his power seems to be emerging in the House. Reuters on Sunday published an exclusive report detailing how GOP leadership is coalescing behind a plan amounting to amnesty for millions of illegal aliens; it would first start with a border security bill but “may lead to other steps the House of Representatives could contemplate to repair parts of U.S. immigration law.”

Ingraham suggested on her radio program on Friday that Pete Sessions’ stance for open borders as he laid out during that Rules Committee hearing is an indication he may be doing consulting work for Central American nations seeking to send more of their citizens to the United States legally or illegally.

“Is Pete Sessions working with Guatemala and Honduras to bring more people into the country?” Ingraham asked. “You might as well be. He’s putting a welcome mat for anyone who wants to come into this country illegally today.”

Ingraham challenged Pete Sessions to come on her program to discuss his immigration stance, “to see if he’ll have a conversation with me about what they’re planning to do with this immigration reform, what they’re planning to do to sell out American worker.”

 What House leadership is planning to introduce early this coming week, and to push for a vote on sometime this week, is a plan that funds all of government except for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the end of the 2015 fiscal year in September. It splits DHS funding off into a shorter term bill that ends sometime in March, giving off the impression that the new Republican U.S. Senate and emboldened House GOP majority will fight the funding for Obama’s amnesty then.

Even so, Boehner has not pledged he will fight it then—and most conservatives believe that he will avoid the battle at that time especially after what Boehner’s allies did to get the Yoho bill passed—and the lengths to which Boehner’s lieutenants are going to mislead the Republican conference and the American people about the nature of blocking funding for Obama’s amnesty.