On Tuesday, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) appeared on MSNBC to castigate President Trump for his DACA decision, but in a shocking turn of events, host Craig Melvin pushed back, asking if President Obama was out of place for initiating DACA in the first place, when something like that should be handled by Congress.
Here’s the exchange:
MELVIN: Congressman, the merits of DACA notwithstanding, it essentially became a law that was never passed by the branch charged with making laws. Several lower courts have said that it was illegal. DACA was supposed to be a placeholder. So, how would keeping this program in place, which means basically not enforcing the law, how would that be an acceptable solution?
GALLEGO: Well, let’s be clear. This, DACA, and the constitutionality of DACA, has been backed up before. We have seen this happen with different TPS procedures, whether it was for Cubans or for Haitians, or for other huge communities. DACA never gave status in terms of [a] pathway to citizenship to any DACA recipients, all it did was say that they were not going to be prosecuted — something that, again has been proved by the court of law. What the president did is essentially, really, pass the buck. Again, show[ing] he has zero leadership ability. Instead of making a decision to continue this program and not create the instability that he could create, he decided to pass the buck and throw it to Congress.
MELVIN: But shouldn’t it be Congress? Shouldn’t it have been Congress all along that solved this dilemma?
GALLEGO: Well sure, but let’s remember that we did try to do that, and the reason the DREAM Act came in as an executive order is because it failed back in the day, and it did not get through the Senate. So this is not something that, ideally, we wanted, but it was establish law. Another problem that we have right now is that President Trump just kicked this to Congress without any idea of what he would be willing to sign or not.
MELVIN: But Congressman, you can see that the DREAM Act failed more than a dozen times. I mean lawmakers in both chambers have taken this up more than a dozen times and it has failed every time.
GALLEGO: Yes. Again, and that is why the executive order was in place after failing so many times to make sure that people had protection from deportation.
MELVIN: But should that be what executive orders do? Should executive orders essentially be end-runs around the Legislative Branch? If elected lawmakers have said “no,” then why should the President of the United States be able to say “yes”?
GALLEGO: Well, because it is within his constitutional duties and responsibilities if he wants to choose to do that. And at the same time, we were talking about a population of 800,000 to 1.2 million people that were facing deportation and President Obama decided to do that. Now, should Congress always act? Absolutely. We’d love to act first, but there are many instances outside of just immigration where the presidency does have power and uses that because of Congress’ inaction. But hopefully that will stop. Let’s see if Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will follow up with their words and what other senators are saying and pass a bipartisan bill to protect these DREAMers.