Earnest: ‘If the President Were a King or Emperor’ He Would Have Enacted the Senate Bill

“If the president were a king or emperor what he would have done is he would unilaterally implemented the bipartisan Senate bill that passed the United States Senate more than 500 days ago. He wasn’t able to do that. So what he did do is he actually asked his attorney general and his secretary of homeland security to review what  authority he did had under the law and he used every element of the law within the confines of the law to actually try and reform the immigration system as much as he possibly could, to try to bring some more accountability to our broken immigration system. And that is what he did last night and that is entirely consistent with the way that the President Bush, President George H.W. Bush, and even President Reagan used their executive authority under the law to try to address some problems in the immigration systems that existed when they were presidents.

As it relates to waiting for the next Congress — just 2 or 3 days after the midterm elections, Speaker Boehner himself was asked by a reporter directly if he intended to bring immigration reform to the floor of the House of Representatives in the new Congress. He wouldn’t committing to doing so. So that’s a pretty clear indication. We cannot wait any longer for the House Republicans to act on this. We need accountability in our immigration system right now, that the president acted to delivered on that last nigh ...

I do think that everybody who watched the speech last night could tell that the president was speaking from the heart. He was talking about the kinds of values that have animated his commitment to public life for the last couple of decades and I think he was really talking about his vision of what he believes the United States of America can and should be and I think that the steps he announced last night are entirely consistent with those values. I think those are the kinds of values that the Democrats and Republicans across the country — when they were tunning in last night —that they would say they share. Even people who did not vote for the president, even people who don’t describe themselves as supporters of the president understand how the steps that he announced last night are entirely consistent with the kinds of values that we embrace as Americans ...

What the president did, he did everything that he could possibly could within the confines of the law to use his executive authority to repeat our broken immigration system. That is not as much authority as Congress has in this matter. But what the president did yesterday is entirely consistent with steps that were taken by President George H.W. Bush, by President Reagan. I didn't hear Republicans complaining about what President Reagan did when he was president on this matter. And what President Obama did is entirely consistent with what president Reagan did. President George H.W. Bush, when he tried to fix some aspects of broken immigration system, actually expanded legislation that Congress has passed to include about 40 percent of the undocumented population in this country at that time. So, President George H.W. Bush took a pretty sweeping step to try to address some problems. President Obama did the same thing last night."