In an interview with WorldNetDaily this weekend, Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas said that congressional Republicans should respond to President Obama’s threat of an executive order on immigration by “defunding anything” that the president “care[s] deeply about that’s not important to the American people” along with any agency that Gohmert thinks is breaking the law, including the White House itself.
Well, the Founders gave us the power of the purse. It’s going to take a lot of courage to stand up to the president and say, ‘We’re going to start defunding anything that you care deeply about that’s not important to the American people.’ We’re going to start defunding the Attorney General’s office. We’ve got a bill that would actually, and we’ve been pushing to get this into an appropriations package, it says anybody that’s in contempt of Congress can’t be paid their salary. We need to do that, we need to start eliminating money for any agency, including the White House, that is not following the law. And then you get their attention. That’s what the Founders anticipated.
And I know our speaker says, ‘Oh, gee, but we’re only one half of of one third.’ But we’re the most important half of the appropriations process, so if we don’t agree to an appropriation, it doesn’t happen. It’s time we took a stronger stand in that regard.
He also repeated his warning that the influx of Central American families and children at the border is turning the U.S. into a “third world country.” Speaking of efforts to transport children to facilites around the country, he said, “That’s already the beginning of what you see in third world countries.”
