Taking issue with President Barack Obama's executive decree on immigration does not make somebody a racist, Rep. Joe Barton told
Newsmax TV on Friday.
"I don't think there's anything racial about asking the president to enforce the existing immigration laws and to work with the Congress to reform those laws where we all agree there's something that needs to be done," the Texas Republican told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner. "I don't see a racial issue in that at all."
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In a televised address on Thursday night,
the president declared that some 5 million immigrants — primarily Hispanic — living here illegally will be shielded from deportation. He said he was acting because Congress had failed to.
He proceeded despite criticism that the move exceeds a president's authority, and that Obama is asserting powers the Constitution explicitly gives to legislators, not the executive.
Obama also defied warnings from Republican leaders that he would "poison the well" for cooperation between Congress and the White House — whose relations were sour even before the Nov. 4 electoral rout of Democrats that gives the GOP control of the U.S. Senate beginning in January.
Barton, a veteran congressman who touts his suburban Dallas-Fort Worth base as "one of the more diverse districts in Texas," said that Obama missed an opportunity on Thursday to restart the push for comprehensive immigration reform — lawfully.
"If he has said almost identically what he said last night and [then] said, 'I'm sending this as a legislative proposal to the Congress,' we would have taken it under consideration," said Barton. "And I don't think we would have enacted it verbatim, but we would have acted upon it in the regular course of legislative action."
Instead, Obama said, in effect, "Forget Congress, forget last week's election; I'm just going to do this," said Barton. "He's thumbing his nose at everybody in this country, and that's flat wrong."
Barton credited the president with being "partially correct" in one respect — that "amnesty" was the state illegal immigrants already lived under because, until Thursday, the federal government had not addressed what to do with an estimated 12 million undocumented migrants who are here.
"I would partially agree with the president that just doing nothing, in effect, is the de facto amnesty," said Barton, "because it allows the however many millions of people who come into this country without proper documentation to stay here."
The hitch, said Barton, is that "this president is not enforcing the [existing] immigration laws."
"What does get under my skin is that he is trying to act unilaterally, which is against the Constitution," he said. "He is not the legislative body; he is the administrative officer of the executive branch. He's a powerful person — the president's a very powerful office. But he cannot act unilaterally without the support of the Congress."
He also questioned the president's timing and the sudden urgency with which he acted in defiance of Congress.
"When President Obama had a Democratic Senate, [and] a Democratic House when he was first elected, he never sent an immigration bill to the Congress. … So it's a little hypocritical for him now to demand immediate action. When he had the entire legislative apparatus, he didn't do anything," said Barton.