Rep. Trey Gowdy chosen to head House Immigration Subcommittee

South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy has been chosen to chair the House Immigration Subcommittee for the 113th Congress that starts in January. Rep. Gowdy is wrapping up his first term in Congress where he served as a prominent member of the subcommittee. He’ll replace Rep. Elton Gallegly who is retiring at the end of the session.Rep. Gowdy has earned an A-minus over his first term in Congress. He hasn’t cosponsored much immigration-reduction legislation, but he was voted consistently for immigration-enforcement measures and voted in both the Subcommittee and on the House floor to eliminate the Visa Lottery.Rep. Gowdy has used his position on the House Immigration Subcommittee to aggressively question the Obama Administration’s lax enforcement efforts and deferred action memos. During a July 2012 subcommittee hearing with DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano testifying, Rep. Gowdy questioned the legal authority of her June 2012 memo that ordered DHS to broadly use prosecutorial discretion and deferred action for illegal aliens who would otherwise qualify for the DREAM Act.Rep. Gowdy asked Sec. Napolitano whether or not she had the authority to use prosecutorial discretion for such a large class of individuals. When Sec. Napolitano reponded by emphasizing the case-by-case nature of the policy, he asked why she wrote the memo in the first place if her agency was already using prosecutorial discretion on a case-by-case basis.”This memo gave you no more authority than what you had before you drafted it,” he said.To see Rep. Gowdy’s grade card, click here.