Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus disputed Alabama senator Jeff Sessions’s suggestion that the spending bill advanced by congressional leaders breaks Priebus’s midterm pledge that lawmakers would fight President Obama’s administrative amnesty.
“I’m not quarreling with Senator Sessions,” Priebus told National Review Online during an interview Monday morning. “I admire and respect his position on this issue. I think it’s possible to have two very good strategies in place and it’s up to the leadership to decide which strategy they want to take. I’m not saying that Sessions’s strategy is worse, I’m just saying another strategy is the Yoho bill, the 17 governors [suing the president], and fighting this out as soon as we get our full strength in the House and the Senate.”
Sessions mentioned Priebus last week when he denounced a House funding proposal for failing to include language prohibiting the president from implementing his recent immigration orders.
“The chairman of the Republican party made a promise to America on executive amnesty: ‘We can’t allow it to happen and we won’t let it happen . . . everything we can do to stop it we will,’” he said. “Unfortunately, the plan now being circulated in the House fails to meet that test.”
Priebus stands by his campaign remarks but is also touting the current plan. “I think the Yoho bill goes pretty far in its statement against the executive amnesty, but I also think that having an opportunity to fight this with full artillery with a full Senate made up of 54 Republicans and about 247 congressional Republicans, I think, is a good opportunity for us to go at it full bore,” he said. “I do think it’s unconstitutional. I do think that it is something that the president doesn’t have the authority to take action on and I think he should be fought tooth and nail on this issue, and I think that’s what the Republicans are doing.”
The key, for the chairman, is that the short-term continuing resolution funding the Department of Homeland Security needs to be “extremely short-lived” so that the Republican Congress can target the orders before they are implemented.
“We don’t have to have a shutdown of the entire government, but you can have a shutdown of that particular provision that’s being wrongfully funded,” he says. He acknowledges there are two sides to the debate over whether government shutdowns have become too dangerous, politically, for Congress to use its constitutional spending power to restrain the presidency.
“I would rather favor the Constitution,” Priebus says. “And the fact is, we did have a government shutdown in 2013 and we had the biggest historical wins of our party in over a century. So, I think that principle is always worth siding with and the question is, of all the strategies on the table, which one is the leadership of our party going to take. And, I think that’s a tough, difficult question. It’s not an easy answer.”