Joe bid to shift border blame
FOR three years, Joe Biden and his repulsive Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas have encouraged the Third World to enter America illegally. At least 8 million have answered their siren song.
Only now that the sheer numbers of illegal aliens causing mayhem and busting budgets in Democratic cities like New York have become an electoral liability has Biden had an epiphany.
So he is doing what he does best: telling lies to weasel out of blame.
Now he claims he needs Republicans in Congress to give him the “authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed . . . . I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”
But he already has the authority. He could shut down the border today. He has spent three years lying that the border is “secure” and now he’s lying that he needs new laws to secure it.
He could stop suing Texas to prevent Gov. Greg Abbott from sealing his border with Mexico, for starters.
He signed 94 executive actions in his first 100 days to dismantle Trump-era border protections. He could reinstate them with the stroke of a pen.
Just 5,000 a day
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it’s worth saying over and over: Trump drove border crossings to record lows while Biden drove them to record highs.
But in the most astonishing act of political self-harm, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and his merry band of neverTrumpers are giving Biden cover for his lies and setting their party up for Democrats to blame for the border disaster, as long as the billions keep flowing to Ukraine.
They are supporting a “bipartisan” bill which pretends to secure the border, when all it would do, at best, if Biden kept his word, which would be a first, would be to slow the number of illegal border crossings to 5,000 per day.
Yes, really. FIVE THOUSAND invaders per day. That’s what Senate GOP leadership thinks is tolerable. Back in the Obama era, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson called 1,000 a day a “crisis.” And we’re supposed to be thankful for five times that number because it’s half of the 10,000 a day that streamed across the border in December.
McConnell told a closed-door meeting of Republican senators last week that he cares more about the Ukraine funding attached to the border measures than he does about stopping the invasion, according to The New York Times.
This is why Trump is invincible with the Republican base. They understand that the Washington establishment will always put America last.
To emphasize the point, on Sunday, McConnell proxy Sen. James Lankford appeared on Fox News complaining that the 5,000 number of illegal crossers allowed in the bill was just “Internet rumors” and was “the most misunderstood section of this proposal.”
First he said: “This is not about letting 5,000 people in a day,”
And then in the next breath he said the opposite: “This is set up for, if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down . . . .
“This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker saying, I’m going to let one more. And we’re at 4,999, and then it has to stop. It is a shutdown of the border and everyone actually gets turned around.”
In other words, it means temporarily closing the border when crossings reach a level that would overwhelm border facilities — about 5,000 migrants a day. How about none.
An invasion is an invasion, whether it’s orderly or not.
The pretense that Biden’s border disaster is not an invasion was shattered last week when 10 highlevel former FBI officials signed a letter warning: “The country has been invaded, an invasion that will continue as long as the nation’s enemies perceive it will be tolerated . . . .
“Invasion of the homeland [is] unfolding now [in which] military aged men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands — not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane but rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.”
Against this warning it is inconceivable that Republican leadership in the Senate is still advocating a bill that is complicit in continuing the invasion, only maybe at a slower pace.
It’s sad that the House Republicans had to coerce their Senate colleagues into paying attention to the border by tying it to McConnell’s pet cause of Ukraine.
But it’s even sadder that McConnell tried to trick his colleagues into accepting a dud deal that keeps the border open and gets Biden off the hook.
Electoral poison
Maybe sadder still is that McConnell and friends are trying to blame Donald Trump for scuttling their fabulous “bipartisan solution” because they claim he wants the border to remain a festering sore until the election.
Trump just told the truth, which is that the deal is a nonstarter. McConnell probably won’t even get a majority of Republicans to agree to it.
But he’s handed Biden the one fake talking point he needs for the election: If “MAGA Republicans” had just passed this bill he would have stopped the border crisis.
It’s up to Gov. Abbott and the two dozen Republican states that are backing him to defy the Biden administration and secure the border. They should all go to the border for a show of solidarity with Abbott this week. They are on the side of the rule of law and the will of the people.
Every time Biden and Mayorkas order their federal agents to cut the razor wire and reopen the border, it’s another nail in the coffin for Democrats’ electoral prospects, whoever is on the Democratic ticket in November.
Everyone knows what Biden has done. We see it in overwhelmed hospitals and schools, shattered budgets, crime and disorder and the sheer unfairness of illegal aliens living high on the hog in flashy Manhattan hotels while American veterans sleep on the street.
Voters won’t forget.