The Mercury One Children and Family Border Relief Fund has raised over $2 million over the last several weeks, and Glenn is going to the border town of McAllen, Texas on Saturday to begin distributing aid to local churches and charities. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) had rearranged his schedule to be at the border with Glenn and Mercury One, but a last minute change has prevented him from being able to attend. On radio this morning, Lee joined Glenn to discuss the immigration debate and the difference between the border crisis and the humanitarian crisis.
Glenn began the conversation by quoting President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was adamantly opposed to slavery, but respected and recognized the Constitutionally defined constraints on presidential power enough to not act out of turn:
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power…”
President Obama either does not understand or simply does not care to exercise the same restraint. Glenn asked Lee how we are to solve a crisis like the immigration situation we currently face, when we have a president who does not respect the rule of law.
“I'm glad you shared that Lincoln quote. It takes great restraint to recognize that although he might be completely convinced that his cause is just and right, it takes great restraint to say, notwithstanding the rightness of my cause, I don't have authority to do this, and so I'm not going to do this,” Lee said. “And that's exactly why we've got to be very careful when electing someone to the presidency of the United States. You know, possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law. There's a lot of truth to that when it comes to who occupies the White House.”
“We do have this awful crisis along the border, and the crisis is born of a lot of bad policies,” he continued. “You know, there's a lot of politics that's bound up in this crisis so much so it's easy to forget there are real people down there who need help.”
Lee is staunchly anti-amnesty and has not supported any of the immigration reform bills that have circulated the Senate. The border crisis is something the government must be responsible for fixing. With that said, Lee believes there is a problem at the border that the government cannot adequately respond to.
“I wish I could be there with you. I think it's great what you're doing. I mean, not all these problems can be addressed adequately by government,” Lee said. “Many of these problems, in fact the most significant problems, are those that have to be met if at all by private citizens, by institutions of civil society, by hard working men and women who just act out of the goodness of their heart – notwithstanding that the fact that all of this is the product of some bad policy coming out of Washington.”
Ultimately, when it comes to dealing with the lawlessness of the Obama Administration, Lee believes it is necessary for Congress to hold the President accountable by exercising the powers given to them.
“We do have to hold this president accountable, and we have do hold him accountable by exercising our powers that is our right to exercise,” Lee said. “Among other things, I think we need to start withholding funding from programs that the President is abusing. We need to address abuses of power with the prerogatives that belong to Congress.”
