CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE: CONGRESS HAS POWER TO BLOCK FUNDING FOR OBAMA'S EXECUTIVE AMNESTY

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has concluded that House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) is wrong, and that Congress can in fact block funding for President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty order.

“In light of Congress’s constitutional power over the purse, the Supreme Court has recognized that ‘Congress may always circumscribe agency discretion to allocate resources by putting restrictions in the operative statutes,’” the CRS, a legislative authority on Capitol Hill, wrote in a report sent to incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). “Where Congress has done so, ‘an agency is not free simply to disregard statutory responsibilities.’ Therefore, if a statute were enacted which prohibited appropriated funds from being used for some specified purposes, then the relevant funds would be unavailable to be obligated or expended for those purposes.”

Sessions’ team provided the CRS report—which is not made public unless members of Congress who request such reports decide to make them so—exclusively to Breitbart News. 

Rogers, last week, argued that Congress could not block funding for Obama’s executive amnesty because the agency that will be printing the work authorization and other documents for illegal aliens—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—operates primarily on fees it collects rather than from tax revenue collected by the federal government.