New York Post, February 5, 2024
Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel once said, “never let a crisis go to waste.”
The Biden administration goes one better: “Never create a crisis and let it go to waste.”
Panicked by alarmingly bad poll numbers on immigration, Senate Democrats are attempting to use the border emergency caused by President Biden’s immigration policies as an excuse to ram through a nearly 400-page bill with no hearings and only a few days to even read it.
The president, who repealed every Trump-era policy that had stabilized the border, is utterly shameless about this.
In a statement Sunday night, when the text of the backroom deal was finally released, he said, “If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option.”
“Chutzpah” doesn’t even begin to describe this level of audacity.
While the president has sufficient authority to stabilize the border, as evidenced by Trump’s success, there’s certainly a need for legislative changes. That’s why the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2 last year, which plugged many loopholes that make it hard to control the border.
But that bill would also restrict the president’s ability to release into the country foreigners who have no right to be here.
Despite President Biden’s newfound urgency to control the border, this was unacceptable to Democrats.
So, instead, they found easy marks among Senate Republicans to try to solve their political problem. GOP leader Mitch McConnell has said that funding for Ukraine (which is the main purpose of this bill) “is the number one priority for the United States right now,” so he was predisposed to agree to almost anything, like the guy who walks into a car dealership with his heart so set in a snazzy new sportscar that he’s talked into to the undercarriage coating and the paint protection package.
Even worse, McConnell selected James Lankford of Oklahoma as the lead negotiator for the border deal.
While Lankford’s voting record on immigration hasn’t been bad, he and his staff have little familiarity with the issue.
The result? Lankford got pantsed by the Democrats.
While there actually are a few provisions in the bill released Sunday that would be useful, the whole package is based on the Democrats’ priorities and goals.
The bill contains a raft of items from the Democratic wish-list that have nothing to do with securing the border, some of which would actually make things worse.
For instance: Why does a border-security bill increase green cards? The Lankford bill boosts family-based green cards by 32,000 a year for five years, and employment-based ones by 18,000 a year. Gallup last year found that 72 percent of Americans wanted the level of immigration reduced or kept the same.
The bill also gives automatic work permits to the relatives of certain temporary workers and others, speeds the issuance of work permits to illegal aliens seeking asylum (thus increasing the incentive to come), and provides taxpayer-funded lawyers to certain illegal aliens, which is currently prohibited by law.
But even worse is the fact that even the actual border provisions reflect the Democrats’ perception of the problem. It’s not that too many foreigners are using asylum claims as a gambit to illegally move here, which is how most people see it.
Rather, the problem for the administration and Democrats in Congress is a political one driven by damaging news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border.
The Republicans supporting this bill have bought into to the idea that everyone in the developing world has a right to be let into to the United States to make an asylum claim.
It’s just that they prefer it happen in “a safe and orderly process” through the ports of entry, so as to avoid news footage of hundreds of people climbing through or around the fence and camping out waiting for their Border Patrol ride to show up.
That’s why, for instance, even when the border is “shut down” by the new emergency power the bill creates, it mandates the admission of “a minimum of 1,400 inadmissible aliens each calendar day” through the ports of entry.
It also effectively codifies an unlawful asylum process the Biden administration is already using, which reduces protections against fraud and incentivizes more bogus asylum claims.
Ironically, the Biden rule this bill would codify is being challenged in court by 20 states, including McConnell’s Kentucky and Lankford’s Oklahoma!
Along those same lines, the many blue cities burdened by illegal aliens let in by Biden have been demanding, not a change in policy, but a bailout from Washington.
And, sure enough, that’s what this border bill does – it provides billions for NGOs and local governments to deal with the streams of illegal aliens who will keep coming.
Back in 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio was recruited by his Democratic colleagues to be the Republican face of their agenda during the Gang of Eight amnesty fight, and he paid a terrible political price. Sen. Lankford has made the same mistake.