Because a battle royale over President Barack Obama's executive decrees can wait until January, the lame-duck Congress should pass a budget that funds everything in full except the immigration bureaucracy — and then clear out and go home, says National Review Online columnist John Fund.
"The alternative is to have a government shutdown in the middle of the holiday season," Fund told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Tuesday. "How much sense does that make?"
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Fund said that
House Speaker John Boehner is "making the best of a bad situation" with a plan to clip funding for the Department of Homeland Security — the agency carrying out the president's disputed immigration orders — while covering the rest of the government's obligations through September.
While Boehner himself warned that Obama was exceeding his authority on immigration, he still hopes to
avoid a shutdown — a move favored by some House Republicans after the president, perforce, lifted the threat of deportation against millions of undocumented immigrants.
Fund said that a shutdown "would sort of reprise all of the Grinch-that-stole-Christmas stories," possibly with the GOP back in the villain's role that the party found itself playing in the October 2013 government shutdown.
The anti-shutdown contingent argues that Republicans will have more leverage to challenge the president in January when they control of both chambers of Congress.
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In the meantime, "Fund the government, but don't fund the Homeland Security Department — which is complicit in, and basically wrote, the president's executive action [on immigration] that frankly is unconstitutional and is probably heading for the courts," said Fund.
"A delay of a few weeks before you take this to court is not going to make a lot of difference," he said.
He said the strategy in January to roll back the immigration orders should proceed on two tracks: the courts, where the House is already suing Obama over a delayed provision in the health are law; and Congress, where the GOP will finally be able to get House bills voted on in the Senate.
"The Republicans favor — and should favor — lots of immigration reforms," said Fund, citing student visas, high-tech foreign worker programs, temporary agricultural labor and border enforcement as areas in need of fixing.
"They should pass all of these bills as separate items send them to the president's desk," said Fund. "The president claims he wants immigration reform: Let's find out if he only wants immigration reform that he likes, or whether or not he wants to have immigration reform that represents a bipartisan consensus."
Fund acknowledged that the political climate doesn't appear favorable to deal-making.
"The divisions between the two parties are deeper than they have been in 70-80 years and, as a result, you're going to see sharp conflicts," he said. "That doesn't mean that something can't be done. Something always gets done. The question is how much and to what extent people are willing to compromise."