President Donald Trump hosted several families at the White House Wednesday. They were there for a special reason, and I guarantee that none of them wanted to be there for that reason.

Sadly, each of these families lost a loved one due to the actions of criminal illegal immigrants. These families have experienced pain and suffering because of the gross negligence of the federal government.

“You lost the people that you love because our government refused to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” President Trump said. “For years, the pundits, journalists, politicians in Washington refused to hear your voices, but on Election Day 2016, your voices were heard all across the entire world.” The president assured them that their loved ones did not die in vain.

The president announced his support for several pieces of legislation pending in Congress to crack down on illegal immigration and defend our borders. The House was expected to vote on two bills Thursday — Kate’s Law and the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act.

Named after Kate Steinle, a San Francisco woman murdered by an illegal immigrant who had been deported multiple times, Kate’s Law increases penalties for illegal reentry, so that someone like her murderer would have been locked up rather than on the streets.

The second bill, No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, requires cities to fully cooperate with federal immigration officials. It would also allow individuals hurt by criminal illegal immigrants to sue sanctuary cities.

Both bills have strong public support. (Here and here.) Yet progressives in Congress are fighting them. It seems they care more about open borders and protecting illegal immigrants than they do about protecting American citizens.

Failing to Plan…

Fox News released a new poll finding that just 27% of voters support the Senate GOP’s plan to overhaul Obamacare, while 54% oppose it. Eighteen percent don’t know what to think. That poll is in line with others showing that Republican efforts to rollback Obamacare are very unpopular.

I suspect half the country could not identify one single thing the GOP legislation does. As it is, there is the House proposal, the Senate proposal and there will be a new Senate plan released today.

Members of Congress are complaining that even they don’t know what is in it, so how on Earth can it be accurately polled?

Then again, if the GOP plan is going to kill hundreds of thousands of people, gut Medicare and fail to lower premiums, then I would be against it too. Of course, that isn’t what the legislation does. But left-wing talking points are all the American people are hearing right now.

Here is what is really bothering me.

I’m sure you heard the saying, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Watching the Republican Party stumbling in its efforts to repeal Obamacare, I can’t help but think that the GOP failed to plan for this day.

House and Senate leaders have had seven years to figure out how they were going to handle this. Why was there not a consensus plan that Republicans could agree on? Why did no one realize the Left and its media allies would distort any GOP proposal to repeal Obamacare?

Why haven’t Republican groups raised $50 million to make the case for their plan? Well, perhaps that’s because there isn’t a GOP health care plan. “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

The party has spent millions of dollars to hold several House seats in recent special elections. Those may be Pyrrhic victories.

There won’t be enough money to win vulnerable House and Senates seats next year if the public thinks Republicans have done terrible things to their health care or nothing at all to address the Obamacare disaster.

Kudos to King

One House Republican, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), is doing his best to advance conservative ideas when it comes to health care reform. Wednesday, the House passed Rep. King’s tort reform bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that King’s Protecting Access to Care Act would save more than $50 billion over a ten-year period and would reduce medical malpractice insurance premiums by as much as 30%.

Move On!

The Russian investigation has taken yet another bizarre turn. ABC News is reporting that congressional investigators want to question President Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller.

In addition, new reporting indicates that key intelligence regarding Russia’s meddling came from a questionable foreign source. In fact, The Washington Post wrote, “Because of the source of the material, the NSA was reluctant to view it with high confidence.”

And there are also allegations that the charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn may have resulted from a personal vendetta by Andrew McCabe, a top official at the FBI. By the way, McCabe is also under investigation.

My friends, I don’t doubt that Russia tried to meddle in our election. But that is Barack Obama’s problem, not Donald Trump’s. Barack Obama was president at the time, and his appointees ran every agency charged with confronting the Russians.

And let me remind you of Obama’s approach to Russia.

You may recall that during the 2012 debate, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was our most serious geopolitical threat.

He also mocked and downplayed the idea that Russia was a threat to our election. At a December press conference, Obama said:

This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme. They hacked into some Democratic Party emails… Routine stuff… So in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that [anything worse] didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out… And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process.

If anyone was colluding with the Russians, it was the man who was so eager to show Putin his “flexibility.”

If this was just “routine stuff” and Putin did “cut it out,” why do we have a special counsel and what is he investigating?

As Democrats used to say, it’s time to move on.