Even the judge who dismissed Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s lawsuit — which argued that subsidies given to lawmakers and their aides amount to special treatment and violate the law — recognizes the seriousness of the case, Johnson told Newsmax TV Tuesday.
“[The judge] pointed out what a serious issue the case was really talking about and … he basically quoted James Madison,” said Johnson, a Republican. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. So the judge does realize how serious the issue is that my case is trying to highlight and so we’re going to press forward with an appeal to the Seventh Circuit.”
Last month, a federal judge dismissed Johnson’s suit, ruling that he did not have legal standing to bring it. Johnson called the dismissal a “technicality” and said he is appealing the decision.
House Speaker John Boehner’s suit on behalf of the House of Representatives is an attempt to do the same thing Johnson was doing: Highlight “the accumulation of greater and greater power in the hands of the executive and those agencies,” according to Johnson.
“We don’t seem to write laws anymore in this country,” Johnson told hosts J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on “America’s Forum.”
“We write these frameworks for the regulatory agencies [who] really write the laws and one of the amicus briefs filed in support of my case talked about if you take the president’s argument to its logical conclusion, a president in the future could cut everybody’s taxes 50 percent.
“I don’t think anybody thinks the president has that constitutional authority, but who could challenge it? I mean who could show that they were harmed? So at some point in time we’ve got to figure out a way to check this kind of unilateral governance on the part of a president or a future president and from my standpoint, the third branch of government, judiciary, is long past time for the judiciary to get involved in these very important constitutional disputes regarding the separation of powers.”
“It would create just one more incentive among other incentives for illegal immigration,” he explained. “That’s a problem, because if you want to solve illegal immigration, if you want to solve these unaccompanied children at the border, you have to stop the flow, you have to end all of the incentives, all of the inducements for illegal immigration.”
The Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill included $260 billion in welfare benefits for non-U.S. citizens, according to Johnson, something he characterized as a “pretty powerful inducement to come to this country illegally,” especially when combined with Obama’s DREAM Act legislation, which Johnson called the “proximate cause” of the immigration crisis.
“That’s the main incentive that’s caused the unaccompanied children crisis at the border because basically you’re telling the world, if you as a minor can get into America, you’re home free,” he said. “You’re not going to be deported back to the country you came from.”