President Barack Obama is out to "confuse" Americans about his use of executive action on immigration, says Ari Fleischer, who was White House spokesman for President George W. Bush.
"[He's] saying that because other presidents have, like him, signed executive orders that all executive orders are the same," Flesicher said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"The difference is when [Ronald] Reagan and Bush signed executive orders on immigration, they did it to make the executive order comply with legislative intent.
"What President Obama did last night was in defiance of legislative intent. It's entirely different. Presidents were always going to be frustrated by congressional action or inaction. It doesn't mean they can take the law into their own hands."
Fleischer, now president of Ari Fleischer Sports Communications, said GOP lawmakers will have to wait until they take control of the Senate in January before taking action against the president's act.
"At that point, what they need to do is do what they used to do in the old days where they put riders on appropriation bills that were narrowly crafted, that would shut down portions of that agency if the Congress didn't get its way.
"That's called the power of the purse. Republicans have just not handled the legislative tracks properly. We continue to overreach and we shut down the entire government over something isolated or focused.
"We wonder why it backfires on us. You need to fund everything, except the narrow portions of government that apply here. The real hope is we get a few Democrats to get on board and it's a bipartisan effort to do this."
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