If there is a public backlash over President Barack Obama's planned changes to the nation's immigration policy, the House of Representatives will boil over as well, Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King said Thursday.
"I just have this sinking feeling in my stomach about the situation that the president has thrown this nation into,"
King told CNN's Anderson Cooper Thursday after the speech, reports
Breitbart.
"We have a fresh feeling coming off an election. The president know knows what he's doing. Twenty-two times he said that he doesn't have the power to do this and yet he stepped out and did this anyway."
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Obama picked a time to make his announcement when many lawmakers were leaving the nation's capital, King said.
"I can feel that rejection boiling up here," King said. "It’s not to a boiling point. The president picked a time when most planes were leaving town out of Dulles and out of Reagan to go back to the districts had already taken off.
"There are only about two or three of us left in town."
But King said he's been raising the issue over the president's plan for executive action since it was announced this past summer, and he did not see their "temperature go up the way I thought it should have," as "they had trouble dealing with the hypotheticals."
At that point, he said, many of his fellow Republicans had trouble believing Obama would take action.
"Now I think that people are home, that may be a mistake for the president while Congress is away," said King. "They'll be going to some town hall meetings and hearing from their constituents.
"And if America boils over, so will the U.S. House of Representatives."
But meanwhile, it's going to be hard to make a clear Constitutional argument on the issue because Obama is only giving "vague descriptions" when it comes to his plans.
"[He said] if you are a criminal, you will be deported," said King. "We know that's not true. The criminals are not going to be deported. Those who cross the border illegally have committed a crime by definition.
"Those who have committed document fraud, they have committed a crime and most of them a felony, by definition they're not going to be punished by all of this.”
Meanwhile, King said that as a result of Obama's actions, he believes lawmakers need to do something to control the president's actions, reports
RealClearPolitics.
"I would like to start with the most minimal thing we can to put the president back into the constitutional guardrails and then step it up," said King. "That's why I said a resolution of disapproval, the second would be a censure. Third would be to cut out of the appropriations bills those funds that would fund this.
"That's the progressive effort that's moving forward," King said. "But, I don't want to do the last thing. I don't want to do the "i" word. Nobody wants to throw the nation in a that kind of turmoil."
Obama is "not in charge of writing law," King told Cooper. "I fear what he has done is torn Article One out of the Constitution, put it into his own pocket and said, 'I'm now the legislative branch, too.'"