by Ian Hanchett

Oct 28, 2014 9:47 PM PT

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) vowed to “explore every option” to use the power of the purse to defund any executive order to give work permits to illegal immigrants and to add such an executive order to the House’s lawsuit against the president on Tuesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

“First of all, it's unconstitutional, so we're already going through the court system on other unconstitutional executive orders that he has worked on and we would add this to the pile” Ryan said of the prospect of executive amnesty. And “second of all, if we can get the power of the purse, we will explore every option we can to exercise that power of the purse, to get this executive to honor the Constitution. If he were to do something like that, by the way, he'll put millions of people in legal limbo, poison the well for Congress, and do something that's so blatantly unconstitutional and so we're telling the administration ‘don't even think about doing this.’”

Ryan added that a GOP Senate takeover means “we stop his agenda, we stop him from stacking the courts with liberal progressives that could never get a bipartisan vote, from stacking regulatory agencies with liberals that could never get a bipartisan vote. That's what the Senate does to begin with, but then we give the president the luxury to actually make a decision or two. Put bills on the desk.”

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