Josh Earnest on immigration: If Obama were king, he would have implemented Senate-passed bill

White House spokesman Joshua Earnest said if President Obama were a king or emperor, as many Republicans are calling him, he’d unilaterally implement an immigration bill passed by the Senate last year that beefed up border security and provided a pathway to citizenship for most illegal immigrants in the country.

“If the president were a king or emperor, what he would have done is he would have unilaterally implemented the bipartisan bill that passed the United States Senate more than 500 days ago,” Mr. Earnest said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“He wasn’t able to do that — so what he did do was he actually asked his attorney general and Secretary of Homeland Security to review what authority he did have under the law, and he used every element of the law within the confines of the law to actually try to reform as much of the immigration system as he possibly could to try to bring some more accountability to our broken immigration system,” Mr. Earnest said.

A major piece of what Mr. Obama outlined Thursday night was an offer to illegal immigrants who have been in the country for at least five years to come forward and pass a background check to gain a stay of deportation and a work permit good for at least three years.

Unlike Mr. Obama’s announced actions, the bill that passed the Senate would grant an eventual pathway to citizenship for most of the approximately 11 million people currently in the country illegally.

Mr. Earnest said the president’s announcement constitutes a “first step” in trying to fix the country’s immigration system and that the Senate bill would be a “great template” upon which a new Congress could start in January.

“If Congress will pass legislation like that, the president is happy to tear up the executive order, or the executive actions, that he announced last night,” he said.

But even before Mr. Obama’s announcement, Republican leaders in Congress had said if he moved unilaterally on immigration, it would poison the well for any bipartisan cooperation on that issue and possibly others as well.