[tsomer]

Hi DannyTN.

You seem to know something about this, so I ask you:

What can the House do to impede, delay or deny funding for Obama’s projects?

His expenditures are targeted to enrich his followers. Limit his money, and they can undercut his support.

[DannyTN]

"What can the House do to impede, delay or deny funding for Obama’s projects?"

I'm not sure I know anything more than the rest of the freepers when it comes to this.

If it's something like the dream act executive order, where Obama's project consists of not doing something (not enforcing immgration laws), I don't know. How do you defund doing nothing? Remedies include going to court to try to force Obama to enforce the law. We won a recent court battle on immigration in Federal court which told Obama that he couldn't selectively enforce the law. Whether that changes Obama's actions, we'll have to see. But ultimately if Obama continues to refuse to enforce, impeachment is the only remedy.

As for other Obama projects where the projects do cost funds. The remedy really depends on the situation.

• If Obama is using discretionary funds that he has proper authority over, then the House needs the Senate's cooperation to pass a law to defund.
• If Obama is using funds that were authorized for something else, then that's a violation of federal law, and Congress can request the Inspector Generals to investigate or Congress can hold hearings themselves to investigate. Ultimately though it's up to the judicary branch to prosecute and Obama can order them to stand down. But he might throw some underlings under the bus as Congress sheds light on it. Hearings put political pressure on Obama, but ultimately impeachment is the final remedy.

  If we are talking about funding which has not yet been approved by Congress, the house has a lot more power. But so far they've been pretty timid in exercising that power. They have to get the Senate to agree to any spending bill, which means the House can shut down the government completely, but the Senate has been willing to call their bluff. And the House hasn't wanted to cross that line, because it backfired at the polls the last time Congress did that. Anything short of a complete government shut down needs Senate approval.

  That's apparently why they went to this sequester strategy. The Senate was so unagreeable, that the house eventually resorted to working out an agreement for automatic spending cuts (cuts = limited increases, not real cuts) in exchange for a spending bill that met with Senate approval. The house avoided shutting down government and got at least some limits in place in return. Still no detailed budget, which is one of the things that gives Obama a lot of leeway in spending.

  We need to return to detailed budgets, but it's going to take a change in control in the Senate to do that.

  I think the house should play hard ball and fund each department with a separate appropriations bill. The Senate and the President have promised to veto anything like that. But the house would have the moral high ground, and could say, "Hey, we passed an appropriations bill for that and the senate refused. Therefore the shutdown is the Senate's fault not ours. But it's a risky strategy."