Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King reignited the debate Sunday about the Republican-led House considering impeachment proceedings for President Obama, just days after party leaders furiously tried to extinguish such talk.
King suggested on “Fox News Sunday” that the impeachment issue could be reconsidered if Obama again uses his executive powers to delay or defer deportation for illegal immigrants beyond those brought illegally to the United States in past years by their parents.
“I think then we have to start, sit down and take a look at that,” King said.
Political observers have suggested Obama will expand his 2012 executive memo on deportation to include the surge of illegal Central American youths because Congress on Friday went on a five-week summer recess without passing legislation to help fix the crisis.
The GOP-led House passed legislation, but the Democrat-led Senate did not.
On Sunday, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told ABC’s “This Week” that it would be “foolish to discredit the possibility” that House Republicans would try impeachment.
King, a member of a House subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, told Fox: “None of us want to do the thing that's left for us as an alternative.
“But if the president has decided that he simply is not going to enforce any immigration law or at least not against anybody except the felons, which he has done already … I think Congress has to sit down and have a serious look at the rest of this Constitution and that includes that "I" word we don't want to say.”
On Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner said his chamber has no intentions of trying to impeach the president and that such a notion is merely a Democratic fundraising “scam.”
“Talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill,” he said.
Democrats have used the impeachment issue, raised by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, and others to fundraise a reported $3.1 million over roughly the past two weeks and to give Democratic incumbents an issue to run on in November.
Pfeiffer also said Sunday that talk about the president taking more executive action without getting the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security input he has requested is “uninformed speculation.”
“Let’s wait and see,” he said.