Saying "there's no lock on the courthouse door," a former Clinton White House staffer told
Newsmax TV on Thursday that Republicans in Congress should feel free to sue President Barack Obama if they oppose his expected decree of amnesty to illegal immigrants.
"I would welcome that," Democrat strategist David Goodfriend told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner. "That would be an important use of our checks and balances."
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But with Obama just hours from rolling out an
amnesty program in a nationally televised address, Goodfriend argued that courts would ultimately back the president acting on his own to shield millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.
"Let's separate the law from the politics, which is very hard to do in this environment, but let's try," said Goodfriend, a former deputy staff secretary to President Bill Clinton.
"If you look at the law and you look at what courts have said and what prior presidents have done, this really doesn't seem that unusual," he said. "President Reagan did not deport 200,000 Nicaraguans in 1987. That was his executive prosecutorial discretion. President George H.W. Bush did not deport Chinese citizens in 1991. Again, he was exercising his prosecutorial discretion."
In anther case, "A very conservative judge on the D.C. Circuit [of the U.S. Court of Appeals], Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by George W. Bush, said the president can decline, prosecute or make pardons because of the president's own concerns or because of policy objections to the law," said Goodfriend.
"The law on this is pretty clear," he said. "The president can do it and, frankly, if there are those who disagree, they should go to court."
He said the only difference between the amnesty plan of this president and those of two Republican predecessors is the political climate.
"The difference is that Congress [under presidents Reagan and Bush] was not nearly as oppositional to the position," said Goodfriend.
He added: "They didn't have to pass a law for the president to do that — let's agree on that much."
Today, he said, "you clearly have a group of members of Congress, particularly in the House, who vehemently object to what the president is doing."
Congress can either litigate, he said, or legislate — "pass a law themselves" for comprehensive immigration reform.
"Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell often said he wanted things to come up for a vote," said Goodfriend. "I would argue you've got this bipartisan supermajority in the Senate that passed an immigration reform [bill in 2013]."
He urged McConnell to send that bill, which passed 68-32, to the House for another vote "and see what happens."
Goodfriend said that a political or constitutional showdown between Congress and the president is something the U.S. system of government was designed to handle.
"The founders of our nation were geniuses," he said. "They understood there's always going to be rivalry between these branches, the executive and the legislative. Everyone has their own agenda. They're not friends, but if they want to get things done, if they want tax reform on the Republican side of the ledger, if they want immigration reform on the Democratic side of the ledger, they're going to have to horse trade to get it done."
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