Hearing on border wall veers off course
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was intended to be a long-scheduled discussion of border walls, but suddenly Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, was being quizzed repeatedly about the vulgar word, or words, said to have been uttered by the president describing the countries of origin of African immigrants.
Nielsen was asked about the Oval Office episode in which President Donald Trump has been quoted by participants as calling African nations “shithole countries,” and she responded, “I did not hear that word used.”
She conceded it might have been said without her hearing it and said she could not recall the president’s characterization of African countries.
“The conversation was very impassioned,” Nielsen told members of the committee. “I don’t dispute that the president was using tough language. Others in the room were also using tough language.”
Asked directly by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. — who attended the Oval Office meeting and reiterated in an interview Tuesday that he had heard Trump use the offending phrase — Nielsen said the president had become “impassioned” and was “using some strong language.”
“I don’t remember a specific word,” she said.
Other senators suggested the word used might have been “shithouse” and that those denying the story might be basing their rebuttals on a technicality. (Nielsen said she did not hear that particular word either.) And Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was also present at the Oval Office meeting, said the entire episode had devolved into an “s-show.”
The hearing demonstrated how far the discourse had fallen in a high-stakes negotiation over an immigration plan meant to protect about 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children who could face deportation as soon as March.
“We’ve wasted five days fighting over one word, when we should be fighting over the people that are involved in the DACA program,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, using the acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program created by President Barack Obama that Trump rescinded in September, setting a six-month clock — until March 5 — before recipients would begin to lose their special status.
“No one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct — he isn’t,” Sanders said, adding that it was “one of the reasons the American people love him” and he won the presidency.
The White House initially did not dispute the account, and Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, two Republicans who were also present, first said they could not recall what was said. But the senators changed their stories over the weekend, attacking Durbin’s account of the meeting. Perdue said flatly that the word was never used; Cotton said he did not hear it used.
On Tuesday, Durbin told CNN, “Sen. Cotton and Sen. Perdue should remember a word as gross as that in the course of a conversation with the president of the United States.”
Asked about whether Cotton and Perdue could be technically correct if Trump had instead said “shithouse,” Durbin was incredulous.
“I can tell you explicitly they are wrong,” Durbin said. “And let me also say, is that their defense? That s-house is acceptable, s-hole he would never say? Come on. To think that the president of the United States would refer to any country on Earth as an s-house country, for goodness’ sakes, what does that say?”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department on Tuesday said it would take the “rare step” of asking the Supreme Court to overturn a judge’s ruling and allow the Trump administration to dismantle DACA if Congress doesn’t act.
The Trump administration said it has appealed U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. But the Justice Department also will petition the Supreme Court later this week to intervene, an unusual action that would allow the government to bypass the 9th Circuit altogether in its bid to phase out DACA starting in March.
“It defies both law and common sense” that a “single district court in San Francisco” had halted the administration’s plans, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.