Thread: Rep. Mooney: Manchin Supporting Obama Executive Amnesty By Supporting Senate Filibust

Rep. Mooney: Manchin Supporting Obama Executive Amnesty By Supporting Senate Filibuster

by Matthew Boyle
17 Feb 2015
Washington, DC

Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV), a conservative freshman Congressman, tells Breitbart News that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is in effect voting in support of President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty by continuing to back Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s filibuster of the House-passed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill. Mooney’s pressure on Manchin comes after a federal judge, Andrew S. Hanen, ordered the Obama administration to immediately halt implementation of its executive amnesty, something the administration has now reluctantly agreed to do.

“Yeah, yeah that would be true,” Mooney said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked if Manchin’s backing of Reid’s filibuster of the House-passed bill is a vote for Obama’s executive amnesty.

“I’m hoping that in the coming days, he and the others will drop the filibuster,” Mooney said of Manchin.

What President Obama is doing on these executive actions, not just on immigration but also in the war on coal as I mentioned before, those things are very unpopular in West Virginia. I do think the voters of this state—the ones I’m hearing from and talking to—want us to stand up to Obama. [Mitt] Romney won this state by 26 percentage points over Obama. Clearly, the voters of this state want to see a different direction. We have two U.S. Senators. Obviously one [Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)] is voting not to filibuster. The other one is. So, we have an issue there.

Despite Manchin’s voting pattern in support of Obama’s executive amnesty, he has been publicly saying he opposes Obama’s move.

“I disagree with the President’s decision to use executive action to make changes to our immigration system,” Manchin said in November, according to West Virginia’s Metro News. In the statement, Manchin also called out congressional Republicans for blocking congressional amnesty—which he supports, as he voted for the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” bill last Congress—by saying also: “I disagree with the House’s decision to not even take a vote on the bipartisan Senate legislation that overwhelmingly passed in June 2013.”

Nonetheless, Manchin’s votes to help Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a New York liberal, filibuster the House-passed DHS funding bill are in effect votes for the Obama executive amnesty. Manchin has struggled attempting to explain why that’s not the case, though—and in fact, doesn’t know where Congress can do anything to stop Obama’s amnesty.

“I agree that the president overstepped his bounds, this is just the wrong place to do it,” Manchin told the National Review’s Joel Gehrke when asked whether he’d drop the blockade earlier this month, before the court ruling stopped Obama’s amnesty for now. Toward the end of the brief interview with Gehrke in the U.S. Capitol, Manchin abruptly ran away from him without answering basic questions about the DHS funding bill and Obama’s executive amnesty.

Manchin’s office has not responded to a Breitbart News request for comment in response to Mooney’s interview.

Mooney said that the people of West Virginia can pressure Manchin to drop his backing of Reid’s filibuster to support Obama’s executive amnesty—and rejoin back with West Virginia values—by calling his office and demanding he abandon the blockade.

“Our constituents in the state of West Virginia, and anyone who is concerned about this, should obviously contact all their elected officials—their two U.S. Senators, and us three members of Congress and express their concerns,” Mooney said.

Constituents are watching. I was on a radio show just last week, and the talk show host asked when the funding deadline was—and he didn’t actually realize that it was at the end of February, it was coming right up here. Especially as that deadline gets closer, there’s going to be a lot more attention paid to the filibuster going on in the U.S. Senate.

Mooney said the people of his state are smart enough to see what Manchin is really doing.

“The voters are smart,” Mooney said.

I believe voters are smart and can figure things out. There’s a political blame game going on, and they [the Democrats] are trying to blame us—the U.S. House of Representatives—for not passing a different kind of bill. It’s going to be really hard to do that blame game with smart voters when the U.S. Senate is actively filibustering the bill right now. I think the voters are going to want to see a bill move in the U.S. Senate.

Mooney said that the injunction Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued ordering the president to immediately stop the amnesty’s implementation proves that what the House of Representatives did by passing a DHS funding bill that blocks taxpayer money from being expended on the illegal amnesty was right.

“Frankly, you can disagree on the issue itself,” Mooney said.

But I don’t think there is room for really any well-reasoned disagreement with the unconstitutionality of the president’s actions. My mother is an immigrant from Cuba, and the reason our country has thrived—and the reason immigrants have come here not just over the past few years but over the hundreds of years—is because we have the rule of law. We have the Constitution. It protects us all equally. That Constitution right now is being ignored by the president. That cannot stand. For the good of our country, the Congress needs to stand up for its equal powers. The court has obviously been engaged here. We hope that they proceed to be engaged on this particular issue and then of course you have the president who thinks he can do whatever he wants right now. This is taught in school—you have the three branches of government. It’s not hard for anyone to figure this out.

Mooney also praised the ruling from Judge Hanen’s ruling.

It seems like everyone even President Obama himself thought Obama’s executive amnesty order was unconstitutional,” Mooney said. “I think at this point, it’s been pretty widely reported that even President Obama himself said 22 times that he didn’t have the authority to do what he’s doing. Speaker Boehner actually made that point on the House floor pretty well, read the 22 times Obama said that—referring to the 22 times Obama himself said he’s not a king, not an emperor and then he turns around and does it.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...te-filibuster/

Nice job, Mooney! Good for you! And thank you for standing tall for American citizens, American workers, and American taxpayers. What's been going on through the Executive Branch with regards to immigration is a national travesty, and it must stop.

Not a dime, Republicans, not a dime. Hold the line. Stand your ground.

And someone please tell the US Treasury Department to start shutting down all these phony cartel backed 501 C 3's telling illegal aliens to ignore the court's ruling and prepare for amnesty. That is so wrong on every possible level.