Will House Republicans censure the president over his unilateral immigration move? Will they ban him from delivering the State of the Union address?

As Congress returns Monday for its final two-week session of the year, Republicans livid over President Obama’s executive actions must decide how to respond. Speaker John Boehner has vowed that the House GOP majority “will, in fact, act” to restrain what it sees as Obama’s overreach, but he has given no indication of what move he favors. House Republican lawmakers will meet privately on Tuesday morning, shortly before the Judiciary Committee holds an initial hearing on Obama’s new measures to protect as many as five million undocumented immigrants from deportation.

In the 10 days since the president announced the policy changes, Republican lawmakers and commentators have suggested that Congress counter with everything short of impeachment. One prominent conservative voice on immigration, Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho, said Republicans should formally censure the president, while Rich Lowry of National Review has said the House should withhold its annual invitation for the president to deliver the State of the Union address in the Capitol in January. Others favor more traditional forms of legislative confrontation, like trying to block funding of Obama’s actions through the appropriations process.

Here’s a look at the GOP’s options, in order of most likely:

Take Obama to Court

House Republicans have already filed a lawsuit over Obama’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and aides to the speaker have made clear that the House could move quickly to add the immigration issue to its list of legal grievances. Boehner and other party leaders have consistently argued that the directives amount to an unlawful usurpation of congressional authority, but some conservatives are lukewarm about a lawsuit on the grounds that it could take years to litigate in court. And because there isn’t much precedent for one chamber of Congress suing the president, a judge could simply rule that the House isn’t an aggrieved party and doesn’t have the standing to bring a legal challenge.

Power of the Purse

A showdown over spending is the preferred response for many conservatives, who argue it is the avenue most clearly prescribed by the Constitution. Yet in practice, it may be difficult for Republicans to withhold funding for the implementation of Obama’s executive action without risking a shutdown of the entire federal government that party leaders have ruled out. Congress must pass a spending bill by December 11, and one idea described by lawmakers on Monday would be to approve an omnibus appropriations bill covering the entire government with the exception of the agencies charged with enforcing the president’s immigration order. Those departments would be kept on a short leash and have their funding extended only temporarily so that the new Republican Congress could confront the administration in 2015.

There are questions, however, over whether that strategy would work. The GOP chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Hal Rogers of Kentucky, has said Congress cannot strip funding for the president’s policy because immigration enforcement is funded by fees, not congressional appropriations. But conservatives have pointed to a new report by the Congressional Research Service asserting that lawmakers can block funding in other ways. “We can limit how that money is spent, even if it’s fees,” said Representative John Fleming, a Louisiana conservative. Republicans could still have a difficult time passing that package over Democratic opposition, and if Obama refused to sign it, a resulting government shutdown could backfire on Republicans.

Pass Immigration Reform

Obama has dared Republicans to respond to his executive actions by passing a permanent overhaul of immigration laws that he could sign, and lawmakers are increasingly talking about taking the president up on his challenge despite their anger. “Some people might be afraid of that, but every now and then you have to give the devil his due,” Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and ally of the House leadership, said in a phone interview Monday.

“Every now and then you have to give the devil his due.”

Boehner has said for months he wants the House to act on immigration, and any bills Republicans would take up would be far different than the comprehensive legislation the Senate passed in 2013. The House measures would focus heavily on border and interior security, although they could also include provisions creating a guest-worker program and increasing the number of H1B visas, as in the Senate bill. Yet the speaker has warned that Obama’s decision to act alone would ruin the chances for reform during his presidency, a view shared by the incoming Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. “He has so poisoned the well on this immigration issue now, I’m not sure whether there’s a way forward or not,” McConnell said last week in a radio interview on the Joe Elliot Show.

Censure

Even Obama’s most ardent conservative congressional critics have avoided calling for his impeachment, but another formal reprimand has generated some discussion in the last week. “Number one, I think we should censure the president of the United States,” Labrador said on CBS’s Face the Nation after Obama’s announcement. “I think it’s unfortunate that he did this. I think we need to lay out clearly why this is unlawful.”

Congress has voted just once to censure a president, when the Senate rebuked Andrew Jackson in 1834 over his veto of the re-charter of the Bank of the United States. (The Senate later expunged the censure from the record.) While the act would be purely symbolic, it would mean that a Republican Congress would have acted to formally repudiate each of the last two Democratic presidents, and it’s an idea that’s not expected to gain any traction with the leadership. “I think it would be useless,” Fleming said.

Cancel the State of the Union Address

The Constitution mandates that the president give a report “on the state of the union,” but it does not require him to do so in person, or in the Capitol. Until a century ago, presidents typically sent their reports in writing, and Rich Lowry, who edits the National Review, said last week Republican leaders should tell Obama he’s “not welcome in our chamber” this year.

In short, this is not going to happen. Boehner is, above all, an institutionalist when it comes to the ceremonies and traditions of government, and he’s not about to risk the political backlash that would follow a move so disrespecting of the president, no matter how angry his members are. “That’s incredibly childish, peevish, and petty,” Cole said, offering an opinion likely shared by the leadership. Obama will deliver a State of the Union address in January, but Republicans might sit on their hands a little more than usual.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-will-republicans-rebuke-obama-on-immigration/383294/

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ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss voters will decide on Sunday whether to force the central bank to boost its gold reserves and whether to impose radical limits on immigration in a series of referendums that have put global markets and business leaders on their guard.

Switzerland’s system of direct democracy gives citizens the right to force popular votes if they can gather enough signatures of support.

Initiatives that are approved in such votes must be written into law within three years, regardless of how unpalatable they are to policymakers and the business community.

Sunday’s votes reflect growing unease with what some of the population view as a dangerous drift away from traditional Swiss values.

Despite Switzerland’s prosperity, some citizens see the country as under siege – from immigrants seeking work and from trading partners who have insisted in recent years that the Swiss dismantle their business model based on banking secrecy.

The recent flurry of popular initiatives is having repercussions beyond the country’s borders, threatening to undermine its reputation for stability, spooking foreign firms, and fuelling debate about ties with the European Union, of which Switzerland is not a member.

“This Sunday is also about the future of Switzerland in Europe,” national daily TagesAnzeiger wrote on Saturday. “The vote on the (immigration) initiative is also a vote about the bilateral agreements with the EU.”

Polls suggest that none of the three initiatives up for vote on Sunday – the gold and immigration referendums plus a third on taxation of wealthy foreigners – will pass.

But they are still being closely watched abroad because of the upheaval they would cause if they did go through.

Gold and foreign exchange markets are bracing for the outcome of the gold initiative, which, if accepted, would compel the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to hold at least 20 percent of its assets in the precious metal and prohibit the bank from ever selling the reserves, already the seventh largest in the world.

The central bank has urged voters to reject the gold initiative, saying it would have to buy 70 billion Swiss francs (46.34 billion pounds) worth of gold – around two-thirds of the world’s total annual gold production – within five years to build up its reserves from roughly 8 percent of its assets currently.

The rules, backed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, could also roil financial markets by making it more expensive for the SNB to defend its 1.20 per euro cap on the franc, imposed at the height of the euro zone financial crisis in 2011 to protect the economy from a soaring currency.

The central bank would need to buy up gold as well as euros when intervening to weaken its currency, potentially casting doubt on the viability of its cap policy, which has already come under pressure from a weakening euro.

“This is certainly not the right time to spend tens of billions of francs to satisfy an expensive right-wing caprice, while the European Central Bank is preparing for a full blown quantitative easing in the coming month,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an analyst at Swissquote.

A second vote will decide whether to cut annual immigration by three-quarters from current levels, with the aim of reducing the strain that high levels of immigration have put on Switzerland’s natural resources.

The vote could confound the government’s attempts to salvage its raft of treaties with the EU, its biggest trading partner.

In February, the approval of a previous vote to limit immigration called into question the country’s commitment to the free movement of people principle on which Switzerland’s economic ties with the EU are based.

A third vote to decide whether to scrap one of Switzerland’s biggest tax perks for expatriates could deal a blow to the country’s reputation as a tax haven.

Early projections are due at around 1130 GMT after polls close, with final results expected by about 1600 GMT.

(Reporting by Alice Baghdjian; Editing by Noah Barkin and Hugh Lawson)

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WASHINGTON — Immigration to American shores is in the newspapers and on television every day now, and many Americans doubtless believe they know what this bedeviling problem is really about. They would feel secure, for instance, in endorsing these common beliefs about the mass movements of people across U.S. borders:

– “America is a nation of immigrants.”

– “It doesn’t matter where the new immigrants come from. They will all quickly adopt American traditions, principles and history.”

Well, allow me, please, to take on these supposed truths about immigrants — to America and to prosperous countries around the globe — and to supplant them with what I have personally observed in years spent traveling around the world as a foreign correspondent.

– First, to me, America is not essentially a nation of immigrants. Yes, three of my four grandparents did come to America as immigrants, and one side was here sometime soon after the Mayflower. This is true of probably a majority of Americans today. Even the American Indians, our one truly native people, sometime back in history crossed the Bering Strait from their original homeland in Central Asia.

America, instead, is a nation of citizens. Being an immigrant was the first, unfinished state of those men and women who would come here, but citizenship was the desired, finished status of those who entered legally and conscientiously. No matter how many try to say that illegal aliens have some fuzzy, incoherent “right” to come here without benefit of legality, the argument just doesn’t wash.

While those who respect our nation are willing to wait in line to come here legally, there is simply no rational excuse for those who would essentially show their contempt for our law by making their first act in this nation be one of deliberately and repeatedly flouting that law.

– As to adopting American traditions, customs and history, it CAN happen that immigrants risk their lives to come here because they treasure American values, but it doesn’t usually happen.

Surely, great musicians, thinkers and writers have struggled to come to America, the better to exercise their talents. But the greatest number of immigrants come from poor countries, and they come here either for purely economic reasons or to escape unspeakable violence in their homelands.

Mexican-Americans still root for Mexico at sports events in California, and until recently roughly 50 percent of Mexican students here have not graduated from high school. English is far from being the primary language of Latin Americans who come to the United States.

The situation with Muslim-Americans is far more threatening and dangerous. One hardly needs to repeat the horrors of terrorism visited upon Boston or New York by Islamists who came to America and repaid its hospitality only by attempting to terrorize its citizens at home and destroy its soldiers and interests abroad.

Here, unfortunately, is where questions of racism and multiculturalism enter the picture.

Many of the arguments supporting any kind of immigration, employing reasons ranging from charity to economics, insist that those who are against illegal immigration are racist, since many of the questions of “Who belongs?” involve skin color and the belief that all peoples will embrace the same principles if only given the chance.

But the fact is that all groups do not embrace those same values. American history has been filled with examples of ethnic groups persisting in attempting to re-establish their former identities here. The Germans tried to impose the German language in schools and through the pro-Hitler Bund in the ’20s and ’30s; Latinos are now establishing Latino power groups instead of assimilating; and, of course, radical Islamists remain today the major outside threat to the nation.

The fact that any mention of differentiation among national, ethnic or racial groups opens one to the worst character slurs is unfortunate, indeed, because throughout history, different groups have at times held superior positions while others, who would later become superior, held minor positions. Think of the early German and Viking tribes, dancing around fires and destroying real civilizations such as the Romans. Darker-skinned Egyptians and Nubians were once the dominant civilizations and rulers of the world, possessing great buildings, knowledge and science that we wonder at today.

Yet it remains somehow wrong that we see peoples in terms of their periods of rise and fall, rather than at any one moment. And this is surely one of those slippery but real truths that we must be more honest about as we discuss and act on immigration to America in our time.

(Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer(at)juno.com.)

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