The American public should call and email Congress to ensure the GOP leadership blocks President Barack Obama’s proposed rollback of immigration enforcement, Rep. Matt Salmon told The Daily Caller.
Voters “should deluge the place with phone calls and emails to let their wishes be known because that’s what impacts the members around here,” said Salmon, who has already rallied 60 legislators to demand anti-amnesty spending curbs be included in the 2015 budget.
More public pressure will cause more GOP legislators to sign onto his letter and block Obama’s amnesty, he said.
The budget must be completed by Dec. 11 to avoid a temporary shutdown of government agencies.
Salmon launched the campaign after Obama threatened Nov. 5 to provide amnesty and work permits to millions of illegals, unless the GOP agree to pass an immigration bill.
On Nov. 12, Obama’s aides outlined a plan to provide work permits to roughly four million illegals who are now living in the United States.
By making the threat, Obama and his aides have suggested they will veto spending bills — and thus shut down parts of government — if the GOP add language in the spending bills that would bar spending on Obama’s work-permit plan.
Salmon is determined to block Obama’s amnesty.
“If the president is hell-bent on breaking the law and illegally granting new immigration benefits through executive fiat, we have a constitutional responsibility to fight it with the tools we have,” he told TheDC.
“One tool we have that is tried and true is the power of the purse, and we should make if clear in any spending bill that no funding bill will allow an kind for this illegal activity that the president wants,” he said.
On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner declined to say he would back spending curbs — dubbed “appropriations riders” — but did say “we are going to fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this path.”
“No decisions has been made as to how we will fight this if he proceeds,” Boehner said. “All options are on the table.”
A top adviser to Boehner, Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, suggested to The Washington Post that spending curbs are an option.
“You can issue all the executive orders you want. If you don’t have any money to enforce them, they don’t go very far,” he said. “We’re going to be pretty aggressive in using the power of the purse.”
Salmon say the American public needs to keep the pressure on Boehner, the chairmen of the appropriations committee and passive GOP legislators.
“There are a lot of people in this town that want to play it safe, 100 percent of the time, they don’t want to make waves, they just want everything to run [smoothly],” he said.
“I think the American people expect to do our job,” he said.
Obama’s amnesty and work-permit threat is part of a strategy to coalesce the support of Latinos for the Democratic Party ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
“If you need these voters to become president, then in order to be president you’re going to have to be pro-immigration, pro-same-sex marriage, pro-economic fairness,” Dan Pfeiffer, a top aide to Obama, told The Washington Post Wednesday.