Republicans are forming a task force to challenge so-called “executive overreach” from President Obama — and it’ll be chaired by none other than Iowa’s Rep. Steve King.
The GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee approved the task force to challenge the President exercising his executive authority on gun control (which Republicans refused to take up legislatively) and immigration (which Republicans also refused to take up legislatively).
“The task force will ‘study the impact the increase in presidential and executive branch power has had on the ability of Congress’ and look for legislative approaches to ‘restore the proper balance of powers,’” said The Hill.
Republicans seem pretty upset at President Obama for exercising powers legally granted to the Executive Office, and there’s actually a pretty easy solution to their so-called problem — they could just do their jobs.
When Republicans won control of both houses of Congress following 2014’s midterm elections, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proclaimed that this would be their chance to finally prove to Americans that Republicans could responsibly govern.
Instead, the nation careened toward a Department of Homeland Security shutdown over immigration action — which President Obama announced because Republicans refused to move on the issue — in a failed strategy handcrafted by King himself.
Now, Republicans want King to chair the group tasked with examining what they forced the President to do himself in the first place. Sounds like a great use of taxpayers’ time and money, guys.
King is notorious as the original Donald Trump, accusing DREAMers of hauling drugs (because they have “calves the size of cantaloupes,” or something) and valiantly telling brave DREAMers who want to serve in the military that “we have a bus for you to Tijuana.”
King’s anti-immigrant notoriety even comes at the expense of his own friends, apparently, when he stood back at a Ted Cruz for President rally in Iowa and allowed the candidate to berate a young immigrant who King had once praised as someone who “lights up any room” she’s in.
As Matt Hildreth recounts in his recent Univision op-ed, when Ofelia Valdez — a DACA recipient who works with special needs children — asked Cruz if she would be deported under his Presidency, he callously answered “Yes” as his supporters applauded.
“Ofelia lights up any room she’s in,” King once said about the young woman he neglected to defend. “I’ve known Ofelia since a town meeting last year and we’ve had a great relationship ever since.” Well, minus that one time at Cruz’s rally. But Steve does whatever it takes to keep himself in the headlines.
Democrats are already slamming the force as a “partisan political witch hunt,” with Rep. John Conyers saying that “these efforts seem to many to be nothing more than political fishing expeditions designed not to get to the truth, but to energize the Republican party’s base voters in preparation for this year’s elections.”
Now with King’s handpicked candidate the winner of this week’s Iowa caucus, don’t expect any end to King’s absurdity anytime soon.