After waiting for years for Congress to act on immigration reform, President Obama finally took some action on his own. In 2012, he issued an executive order exempting "Dreamers" (undocumented immigrants brought into the U.S. as children, and raised in this country) from deportation. And after two more years of GOP obstruction preventing immigration reform, President Obama issued another executive order exempting the families of those Dreamers from being deported. This made sense, because these are just hard-working people trying to support their families and it would be unnecessarily hard-hearted to separate those families.
But hard-hearted seems to be a Republican value, and GOP officials howled like a stuck pig at the president's actions -- swearing to overturn those actions. Now the GOP-controlled House has fired the first shot in that effort.
When passing the budget for 2015 at the end of the last Congress, they excluded the Department of Homeland Security from that budget. They thought the funding for this department was so important that they could use it to force the president to back down on his immigration actions. Now they have followed through on that effort at coercion.
The House has now passed a 2015 budget for Homeland Security, and included provisions in it that would overturn both of President Obama's executive orders (once again subjected Dreamers and their families to deportation). They figured the president would have to sign the bill, since leaving Homeland Security unfunded is a pretty scary thought to them.
They were wrong. President Obama has said he would veto the bill -- if it makes it to his desk. And it might not even make it that far. It could, and probably will be, stopped in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster -- and Senate Republicans don't have the votes to stop a filibuster.
So now it looks like it's going to come down to a political game of chicken. Will Republicans pull out the offending amendments, or will Democrats fold and let the president's actions disappear -- since neither side wants to see Homeland Security unfunded. I'm betting on the former. That's because the Republicans really don't have the public behind them on this issue.
While they are split on whether the president had the authority (with 48% saying yes and 46% saying no), the charts below show they agree with what those executive orders accomplished, and they don't want Congress to overturn those orders. The GOP Congress is playing with fire on this issue.
The charts were made from information in a recent CBS News Poll -- done between January 9th and 12th of a random national sample of 1,001 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.
