“Gentlemen, those are my principles. And if you don’t like them … well, I’ve got others.”

So said Groucho Marx, but it seemed as if Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi were taking a page from his comedic book this week. At issue is border security, or the lack thereof, and the toll that the Democrats’ open border is taking on the party’s midterm electoral prospects. In brief: It ain’t good.

After having enjoyed a brief, mainstream media-induced boomlet a few weeks back, Biden’s party has seen its fortunes fall back once again into shellacking territory. And they’re getting desperate. So much so that Joe and Nancy have donned their Halloween costumes a bit early and are now masquerading as border hawks.

Too little, too late. But it’s good to see them grovel.

Biden, no doubt in an effort to deflect attention from his administration’s smears of our Border Patrol agents, announced Wednesday that he’s finally come to appreciate Donald Trump’s highly effective “Remain in Mexico” policy — not in so many words, of course, and only through Election Day, but imitation is the purest form of flattery. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

Venezuelan migrants who cross the U.S.‘s southern border illegally to seek asylum will be expelled back to Mexico using a pandemic-era border policy known as Title 42, under a new migration agreement announced jointly by the U.S. and Mexico on Wednesday.

At the same time, the Biden administration also is creating a new immigration program to allow up to 24,000 Venezuelans to move to the U.S. legally, to deter them from attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally, the announcement said.

Even soon-to-be-impeached Homeland Security stooge Alejandro Mayorkas was trying to talk tough: “These actions” he said, “make clear that there is a lawful and orderly way for Venezuelans to enter the United States, and lawful entry is the only way.”

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear these people have finally realized that opening our southern border to three million illegal immigrants is going to cost them votes — a whole lot of votes, and many of them Hispanic.

B-b-b-but, we can hear ol’ Joe sputtering, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to let all the lettuce pickers, er, all the brown people in, and they were supposed to vote for us. What about the emerging democratic majority that those two political science experts were crowing about 20 years ago?

Demographics, as it turns out, isn’t necessarily destiny. And Hispanic Americans seem poised to vote for Republicans in record numbers this cycle.

As for San Fran Nan, the soon-to-be-former Speaker of the House pushed herself away from that $24,000 refrigerator and those $13 pints of ice cream to gaslight a few gullible voters in New York City on Wednesday. How? By showing off her phony border-security bona fides.

“What we must do in our country is to have comprehensive immigration reform,” she blathered. “We all know that we must secure our border. That’s our responsibility as a country.”

Indeed, we all know it, and that is our responsibility as a country, but those in a position to do something about it seem more interested in picking stock winners.

“It’s a new phenomenon,” Pelosi continued. “The answer to almost every problem is to have comprehensive immigration reform” blah blah blah blah. “We can’t get that under the present set of circumstances. Short of that though, we’ll have to address the issue.”

Ah, that pesky issue of border security. Here we just wish she’d make up her mind. Does she want a secure southern border, or does she want a steady flow of illegals to, as she so eloquently put it, “pick the crops”?