Republicans are not ignoring the outcome of the election, but are instead doing their best to strategize a way to fund the government while keeping the president from being able to enforce executive amnesty, political strategist and author Dick Morris said Wednesday on "America’s Forum" on
Newsmax TV.
"You're limited in what you can do," Morris told host J.D. Hayworth. "Rather than try to force a round peg into a square hole and address this within the context of the next two or three weeks when we only have one house of Congress, the important thing to do is to make sure that we don't permanently fund the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], that we hold it over until we have a majority in both houses and then can deal with it and that we pass the rest of the continuing resolution. This continuing resolution is a vital step in our strategy."
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"What Obama has always tried to do is when we tried to defund one part of his budget, in this last case, Obamacare, in this case, his immigration stuff, he puts the entire government at stake and closes the whole thing down. What this does is it says the whole thing is open except for this one part and that part we could close down in the future. Republicans, for example, have always wanted to continue to pay Social Security or military pay even if there were a government shutdown. But Obama always says no, you either do the whole thing or you do nothing and it's his way of forcing Congress not to have the line item veto that he does not have as president. But by carving out ICE and funding the entire rest of the government, the Republicans are doing a very smart thing right now, the best they could possibly do."
According to Morris, author of
"Power Grab," Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s plan is to fund the entire government through September with the exception of ICE, which he would fund February or March.
"The question then is ICE and that's just what the Republicans have always wanted to do: focus their fire on the one program they want to shut and not stop everybody from getting passports and going to jail and running drug programs, the whole thing," he explained.
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"The Democrats have always denied the Republicans that weapon, so they can't shoot a single bullet. They have to do a scatter shot. Now
Boehner's proposal will eliminate that."
Morris predicts that the amnesty portion of Obama’s order will remain until a Republican is elected president. Incremental changes can take place until that time while simultaneously keeping the subject alive with voters.
"Revoke it when we get into office," Morris said and "make the case to blue-collar Democrats that the reason there is income inequality is on the one hand our trade posture with China, but on the other hand overwhelmingly immigration and that when the Democrats let in, legalize 5 million new immigrants the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, bipartisan said that will hold down wages for a decade for downscale blue-collar workers. It's the classic argument goes back to the 19th century that immigration holds down wages."
The GOP should use amnesty as a major issue in the 2016 presidential election, he added.
"It drives the Democrats, it drives the cleavage between them and the constituency they need to win and it's not just downscale whites, it's downscale Latinos and downscale African-Americans as well."
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