February 2024 - You always know when it's an election year because the Republicans and the right-wing media start flooding the airwaves with stories (which usually contain exaggerations, if not outright lies) about our southern border. Of course, few of those folks actually have tried to secure the border. They'd rather continue using it as a campaign issue every election cycle.

This pattern of complaining and doing nothing has been going on at least since the George W. Bush years when Mr. Bush tried to pass the first comprehensive immigration reform legislation since the Reagan presidency. That attempt also failed because too many far right Republicans, even back then, preferred to demagogue the issue, rather than to solve it.

Surprisingly, though, it looked like 2024 actually might be different. A bipartisan group of Senators hammered out a border bill that would provide over $20 billion in funding to do the following:

Add more than 1,500 Customs and Border Patrol agents
More than quadruple the number of Asylum Officers to expedite initial asylum screenings
Increase Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds from 40k to 50k
Add 100 more Immigration Judges and staff to adjudicate asylum cases
Install 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect fentanyl at Southwest border ports of entry
Give the President the authority to impose sanctions on foreign nationals knowingly involved in significant fentanyl trafficking

(The Border Patrol union supports the bipartisan bill)

The bill had the support of the Border Patrol Union, the Chamber of Commerce, the South Texas Alliance of Cities, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board. And it likely would have been passed by the entire Congress except for one thing: Donald Trump didn't want a border solution that Joe Biden could take credit for in this Presidential election year.

So Mr. Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, plus all the other Trump lackeys in both the Congress and the media began shouting from the rooftops that the bill was no good (without giving any specifics as to why, of course) and said the House should not and/or would not consider it.

All this political posturing and bluster began even before any of them knew what was in the bill. We know that because copies of the legislation hadn't even been released yet!

As the far-right opposition mounted, lead Senate negotiator James Lankford (R-Ok) repeatedly asked his colleagues to "read the bill" before commenting on it. For those of you unfamiliar with Senator Langford's record, he is about as conservative a Republican as you'll find in the Congress (and, consequently, we have had numerous policy differences with him over the years), but at least he is a Republican who is making an attempt to work in a bipartisan manner and to get things done for the benefit the country.

(Senator Lankford image from cbsnews.com)

Senator Lankford's frustration with many of his GOP colleagues was evident in recent comments he made in support of the bipartisan legislation: "It doesn't have everything in it I wanted, it doesn't have everything in it my Democratic colleagues wanted…But it definitely makes a difference."

"It is interesting: Republicans, four months ago, would not give funding…for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy…And now… a few months later, when we're finally getting to the end, they're like, 'Oh, just kidding, I actually don't want a change in law because it's a presidential election year."

Senators like Mr. Lankford are the types of Republicans we need more of, instead of the types who knuckle under to whatever Donald Trump wants to do. Which, as most objective observers have stated, is doing whatever benefits Donald Trump, rather than what benefits the country.

Home About Us Contact Us