A Word of Warming on the Border Crisis
According to Harris, the cause of the surge isn’t Joe Biden’s ridiculous open-borders policy, it’s the environment.
It’s been blamed for everything from bad acne to bad beer, so it makes sense that if the White House needs a scapegoat on immigration, global warming would fit the bill! America’s supposed border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris (who’s supposed to be addressing the crisis they won’t call a crisis) pulled a Barack Obama this week when she was squeezed on the administration’s non-action. According to Harris, the cause of the surge isn’t Joe Biden’s ridiculous open-borders policy, it’s the environment. Apparently, the thermometer — not Democrats — are to blame for this mess along our southern front! If it’s weren’t so absurd, we’d all be laughing as hard as she was when a reporter asked if she was visiting the border.
This week, though, her climate change fall guy was too much for most Americans to take. There’s “the need for economic development,” Harris insisted, and “a need for resilience around extreme climate” because “severe climate experiences” have been “dampening” agriculture in the Northern Triangle nations where most of the border-crossers come from.“ Joe Biden started this climate con earlier this week — a trick he learned from the 44th president when Obama redirected every question from the Syrian civil war to the refugee crisis to the planet’s temperature.
Of course, as the New York Post editorial board points out, that’s a pretty convenient dodge. There wasn’t "a mention of the corrupt governments that prevent economic progress — and are sure to pocket the bulk of any foreign aid meant to develop those economies or make their farms more ‘resilient.’ Nor did she touch on the gangs that terrorize the common people there, giving them more urgent reason to flee.” And that doesn’t begin to touch on the whole “come-to-our-country-illegally-and-we-won’t-punish-you” posture that’s been beaming out of this White House like a bat signal ever since Joe Biden moved in.
Senator John Boozman (R-Ark.), who was the chair of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, can’t believe the president still isn’t taking the catastrophe seriously. “It’s absolutely crazy,” he shook his head. “I spent a lot of time on the border,” he explained on “Washington Watch.” “Our border agents are… trying to do all they can. But they’re getting just besieged. And I think that’s the correct word. To say that this isn’t a crisis is so hypocritical. When I was having to deal on a weekly basis regarding the border, [it] was considered a crisis at that point. And now it’s beyond imagination.”
He talked about children showing up at the U.S. facilities with a postcard taped to their chest or the phone number of a supposed relative. They were just dropped off, Boozman said. The only way the border is secure, he insisted, is as a source of income for coyotes and criminals. “It’s secure in the sense that the cartels know everybody is crossing and they’re getting a cut out of everyone that crosses. They’re enriching themselves. But it is truly a huge, huge, huge problem.” Back when he was chairing the subcommittee, Boozman couldn’t believe the backlog for adjudicating all of these cases. It was a little over a half-million people then. “We thought that that was unimaginably large. Truly, a crisis. Now it’s swelled up to 1.3 million or something like that…” And frankly, he explained, even the organizations trying to help on the humanitarian side — like NGOs — can’t keep up.
So for the vice president to flippantly dismiss this as some sort of environmental problem isn’t just wrong, it’s outrageous. Real people are exploited, preyed upon, and killed. And the biggest irony of all is that most of these men and women are trying to flee the oppressive governments that Democrats want to institute here! Larry Taunton, an expert on Marxism, wonders why no one is pointing that out. “We keep talking about a border crisis… but no one seems to be asking, why are they coming to our border? I mean, if cattle were stampeding across you or your property, you would want to know what is going on… I went to the other side of the border,” he said. “I crossed South America. And in talking to refugees, what you discover is that they are fleeing socialism and unreasonable lockdowns in search of freedom.”
Frankly, if these illegal immigrants understood what the Democratic Party stands for now, they might stay put — because it will be no better in America if the Left gets its way than where they came from. There’s an environmental problem, to be sure — but it’s the climate of the extremism that’s making it worse for everyone.
Originally published here.
Dems Make Capitol Gains on Statehood
“Racist trash.” Apparently, that’s what you are if you object to the far-Left’s policies. In an astonishing scene on the House floor Thursday, freshman Congressman Mondaire Jones (R-N.Y.) so ferociously attacked Republicans for opposing D.C. statehood that members asked his comments stricken from the record — a concession he finally made, but not before the damage had been done.
“I have had enough of my colleagues’ racist insinuations that somehow the people of Washington, D.C. are incapable or even unworthy of our democracy,” he blasted from the podium. “The truth is there is no good faith argument for disenfranchising 700,000 people, most of whom are people of color,” Jones continued as GOP lawmakers called for a point of order. Actually, the good faith argument was just a few blocks away — in the U.S. Constitution. Look, NRO’s David Harsanyi wrote, “Concerning D.C. statehood, the Founders have already spoken.” But then, the far-Left doesn’t usually consult the law or even our own guiding document about their plans. They just plow ahead, crying racism when the opposition is too great.
Even the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake argued that we’ve “dumbed down” this argument into nothing but partisan politics. “The idea isn’t so much that D.C. doesn’t necessarily deserve voting rights in the House and Senate, as much as that it would be a boon to Democrats,” he writes. Exactly, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said on “Washington Watch.” This is about one thing and one thing only: consolidating power. Just like the Senate filibuster, nationalized elections, and the Supreme Court expansion talk, this is about creating two new Senate seats for the Democratic Party — "two progressive senators [who will] push a radical agenda championed by the squad to reshape America into the socialist utopia they always talk about.“
"In the last week, Democrats passed D.C. statehood out of the House [and] they filed a bill to stack the Supreme Court. They’re trying to federalize our elections,” Comer pointed out. “Everything that’s coming out of the U.S. House of Representatives now is being passed on a party line vote. And it’s the most liberal, radical agenda that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Incredibly, when it came to an issue that should be cut and dry constitutionally, only Republicans voted against it. By a 216-208 party-line vote, House Democrats decided to essentially shred the plain text of our governing document as they plow over every obstacle in their pursuit to a permanent Leftist majority. “The founding fathers were very clear,” Comer explained. “They wanted the capital city independent of any state. There are many references to the capital city in the U.S. Constitution — no other state that was formed was ever mentioned in the Constitution previously. And the big reason it’s not constitutional is the 23rd Amendment. The 23rd Amendment grants Washington, D.C. three Electoral College votes. So if H.R. 51 passes the Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, Washington, D.C. would have six Electoral College votes.”
Comer said that when he brought up the 23rd Amendment during the bill mark-up, Democrat Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) admitted, “‘Yeah, we’ll have to obviously do away with the 23rd Amendment, because we can’t have six Electoral College votes in Washington, D.C.’ They would at least agree with that.” But, Comer laughed, he followed that up with: “‘We’ll do that after the bill is passed.’ Well, I don’t trust them to do that after the bill is passed. There’s already a precedent for how you undo a constitutional amendment — and that was Prohibition. When Prohibition was put into the Constitution and then Congress decided to end prohibition, what did they do? They had to pass another constitutional amendment to end prohibition. So the same thing would have to happen with the 23rd Amendment.”
And if Democrats are really so concerned about District residents, there are other solutions. “The right approach, really, is just give Maryland’s land back, keep federal triangle, keep the White House, keep the Capitol grounds, but give everything back to Maryland,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) argues. “But that’s not what this agenda is all about. It’s about getting two more liberal Democrat votes into the U.S. Senate.” It’s also about beating Republicans over the head with a completely phony racist club. This isn’t about racism — it’s about constitutionalism. And like so many other things on the Left’s wish list, the American people are right to be concerned.
For more on the D.C. statehood arguments, check out FRC’s “Seven Things You Should Know” resource here.
Originally published here.
The Big Sky’s the Limit on Freedom
If Republicans want the Left to leave them alone, Governor Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) has a pretty foolproof plan: Don’t back down. The Big Sky leader has been signing so many good bills lately that his hand must be tired! And he’s done it despite the bullies who’ve come knocking!
When it comes to killing bills, one of the most common tools used by the Left is to misrepresent what the bill actually does, Montana Family Foundation President Jeff Laszloffy pointed out. And that’s the strategy that was used on the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. “Half of the states now have these laws,” he explained. “For some reason, they’re now highly controversial and are supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, which gets to the point of misrepresenting a bill in order to kill it. The most vocal opponents to these types of bills are the LGBT community, even though they can’t point to a single case where one of these laws has negatively affected them.”
As usual, in this debate, leftist activists swooped in and argued that the proposal would give the state “a blank check to discriminate.” But what the legislation actually does, as several legal experts have said, is force the government to come up with a compelling reason to attack someone’s religious freedom. “It’s the standard of review used in most religious freedom cases,” Laszloffy explained, “but not all.”
Now, thanks to Governor Gianforte, who signed the bill into law this week, it will be used in every case. Despite being under intense pressure to kill the bill and veto it, he refused to be like several of his gubernatorial colleagues and cave when the heat was on. “The governor signed SB215 into law to protect the freedom of people of all faiths to exercise their sincerely held religious beliefs,” a spokesperson for Gianforte’s office said unapologetically. “Montana joins 21 other states with RFRA laws, where it has historically been used to allow Native American children to wear braids in school, Sikhs to wear turbans in the military, and Christian employers to refuse to cover abortions under their health insurance policies.”
That’s the kind of leadership we need from Republicans right now. As FRC’s State and Local Director Quena Gonzalez pointed out, the country is in dire need of men and women with strong conviction. “It’s also sort of a reflection of where we are as a society, where our national politics have gone recently that we’re… really being forced to legislate on common-sense issues that just a few years ago we would not have thought we would have to pass laws to protect women’s sports from biological males, from entering and really dominating those sports and taking scholarships and other opportunities away from young women.
But the good news, he points out, is that these protective measures are moving — on religious freedom, human life, girls’ sports, minor transgender treatment bans, parental consent, you name it. "For 10 years now, Republicans have held supermajorities in terms of the states that they control, in terms of the state legislatures and the state capitals that they control. It seems that when people vote for things close to home, they vote for Republicans. And Republicans have really delivered on the issues that American families care about… Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all that’s happening in the states. It’s really exciting.”
And people like Governor Gianforte are only emboldening legislators more. They understand that there may be room for compromise on some issues, but not on core principles. We need to project, as he and Governor Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) have done so well lately, peace through strength. The angry mobs may come, but they won’t prevail against anyone who has the courage to stand.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
