"Impeachment would be a consideration" if President Barack Obama follows through on his threat to act alone on immigration reform, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas said Monday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"If he tries
by executive order to legalize millions and millions of people that came into this country illegally he would have a political donnybrook that wouldn't be good for the country number one, but number two, the president would lose," said Barton. "I don't believe he has the authority to do that."
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Last week's election results are proof that the country does not stand with Obama, according to Barton, who said despite Obama's position as the leader of the free world, the president must follow the rule of law.
"The presidency is a powerful position, but it does have constitutional checks and balances and just because he wants to do something that doesn't mean he has the authority to do it," said Barton. "He really needs to perhaps listen to Vice President Biden and begin to work with the Republican leadership and rank and file. The country wants solutions. They don't want rhetoric and the president appears to just . . . be heck bent on continuing to give this leftist rhetoric which is not where the country is."
Even if
Obama acts alone, the new Congress has the votes, and the backing of the majority of Americans, to stop him, he added.
"There is no way, even if the president were to do try and do some executive order between now and January that it would stand because as soon as the new Congress gets sworn in we have the votes to overturn it," he said, explaining that the electorate has made clear that it wants enhanced border security.
Barton, a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, also discussed Obama's handling of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the 1,179-mile pipeline that can carry heavy crude from tar sands in western Canada to Nebraska and then to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
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The pipeline could be operational already, but the president is "just playing the most partisan environmental politics with the radical left" who oppose it, according to Barton, who noted that the Obama State Department has said multiple times there are no environmental issues with it.
"They hate anything that deals with hydrocarbon in the United States, whether it be oil or gas or coal," he said. "The truth is . . . the American energy renaissance has happened in spite of the president's policies. He's tried to kill coal. He's basically made it impossible to build coal plants. He's hamstrung production in the Gulf of Mexico in the deep water. His EPA numerous times has tried to
grab regulatory authority over hydraulic fracturing and because of the law that I wrote back in 2005, we've made that very, very difficult for them to do.
"The Keystone Pipeline is going to pass the House, it's going to pass the Senate, and if the president vetoes it this time we may have the votes to overturn his veto. So he may get what he wants politically. He may get the grandstand for the left and have the pipeline go ahead because we override his veto. What he should do is accept it and bless it and actually sign the bill and let's move on down the road."
Barton believes Democrats who survived the midterms will be savvy enough to vote in favor if the pipeline.
"If I were a Democrat who survived last Tuesday, I'd be looking for reasons to be supportive of common sense policies that make sense and building the Keystone Pipeline is one of those," he said. "We only need about a fourth of the Democrats to vote with us and we'll have a veto proof majority, super majority."
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