HAGERTY’S ‘FLIGHT’ AMENDMENT
While you were asleep Friday night, the Senate passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill, which was signed later in the day by President Joe Biden.
It will fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year. But Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty managed to get every Senate Democrat on record as voting that the taxpayer-funded practice of secretly flying in illegal immigrants from foreign airports to United States cities is perfectly acceptable.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, apparently had agreed to a series of votes on Republican amendments to the spending bill in return for an up-or-down vote on the bill itself.
Hagerty thought it was important to highlight this practice and challenged Democrats by saying they were “afraid to take a position on Biden’s failed policies by voting on amendments to the appropriations bill.”
They weren’t, it turns out. And all 51 Senate Democrats voted against the amendment.
“It’s all politics,” said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan. “It’s just a — it’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of money. And I think it’s really irresponsible.”
Democrats evidently believe their constituents haven’t punished them for their immigration actions up to now and wouldn’t with this vote.
A recent report by Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, shows that the Department of Homeland Security imported at least 320,000 illegals into the U.S. with flights to 43 different airports. They are part of the at least 6.2 million illegal immigrants (about the population of Missouri) who have swarmed into the country since Biden took office in 2021.
Hagerty, in an address to fellow senators, said his amendment was a simple one.
“Let me cut through the procedural language here,” he said. “I’m bringing forward a vote on a very simple question. Do you support American taxpayer dollars being used to fly illegal immigrants from countries like Venezuela and Haiti into America to be settled in cities and towns near you? If so, then vote against me. Vote no to preserve this practice of using taxpayer dollars to charter planes that move and import thousands of illegal aliens into your states.”
Hagerty added, “Americans are shocked this is happening, and a ‘yes’ vote will stop it. A ‘no’ vote means you are voting to preserve Biden’s egregious scheme to import hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens each year through airports across America.”
Two weeks earlier, he offered another amendment — it also failed — which would have stopped counting noncitizens in the allotment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. Noncitizens have been counted in the nation’s census since 1790.
“The more illegal aliens and noncitizens in your state or district,” Hagerty said, “the greater your voting power in Congress and presidential elections.”
The program Tennessee’s junior senator wanted the amendment to get rid of over the weekend was authorized by the Biden administration in 2023. It allows up to 30,000 people per month to be flown in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at a specified airport (the list of which the administration won’t release), paying their own way. The administration claimed it is allowed to take such “parole” authority under a 1952 law to admit people “only on a caseby-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
One of those paroled immigrants flown to the U.S., according to the New Hampshire Journal, is now under arrest for raping a handicapped 15-year-old at a state-run migrant shelter in Massachusetts earlier this month.
Maura Healey, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, when asked about the security and vetting process in the shelters, told a Boston TV station, “It is unfortunate, from time to time, things will happen.”
Other amendments voted down involved border security, Iran sanctions and the Laken Riley Act.
The Laken Riley Act would have required Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest illegal aliens who commit theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting offenses and would mandate that they are detained until they are removed from the U.S. The legislation also would have allowed states attorneys general to sue the secretary of Homeland Security for failing to enforce immigration policies.
The bill was named after a 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student who was killed while running on campus last month by an illegal alien who had been previously cited for theft and shoplifting but was released.
The amendment also failed, 51-47.
Among the other things Democrats signaled by their “no” votes:
› That they did not want some federal funds kept from local jurisdictions engaged in sanctuary city policies.
› That they did not want illegal immigrants convicted of assaulting police officers to be barred from gaining legal residency in the U.S.
Hagerty’s amendment (or the others) didn’t go anywhere, but it did expose the proclivities of the Biden White House and its Senate apologists. We hope voters are keeping tabs.