Trump’s GOP won’t take yes for an answer
The French famously supported Americans’ fight to win freedom from England and its king. But Republicans won’t support Ukraine’s fight to secure theirs against invading Russians. Republicans won’t take yes for an answer on a bill to enhance U.S. border security after hissing and spitting about it for years. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule, yet have no idea how to do it. But kowtowing before Donald “91 Counts” Trump? They’re hell at bowing and scraping.
Christian conservatives make up a sizable percentage of the GOP base. They are conditioned from childhood to serve a heavenly king and to long for his return. But since Jesus Christ has been delayed now for two thousand years, they’ve grown impatient. They are ready to settle. For Trump.
With President Joe Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits it); with the inflation Republicans expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe following him like a dark cloud; and with the U.S. justice system breathing down his neck about insurrection and other crimes, Trump has no weapons left for waging his 2024 war on America except fearmongering about border security.
Trump wants his war. On nonwhite immigrants and, ultimately, on the freedoms the French helped us win in the eighteenth century.
His enablers in Congress will bow and oblige. They won’t take yes for an answer on the border security bill they’ve ranted about for years (Catherine Rampell, Washington Post):
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
- beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
- a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
- hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
- huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
- reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
House Republicans should have been pinching themselves in disbelief. Yet within hours of this 370-page bill dropping, House GOP leaders ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said, later adding that it was “a waste of time.” He just can’t take yes for an answer, it seems.
Speaker Johnson denies he’s taking orders from the indicted former president, but that’s beyond laughable in this former political party.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!” Trump posted to Truth Social. Give him everything and he’ll insist it’s wrong.
Only he can fix it. His cult is willing to see Ukraine fall and the “chaos” they claim is occuring on the border (and the MAGA convoy in Texas could not find) continue until Trump is back in the White House. They will misinform the public about the proposed bill to justify killing it.
Maybe House lawmakers are genuinely confused about how immigration law works. After all, they keep insisting that President Biden take actions that courts have ruled would be illegal. They also appear to misunderstand (misrepresent?) an aspect of the bipartisan Senate deal, in suggesting that it “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” This is not, in fact, what the bill would do; rather, it would force the United States to block anyone crossing between ports of entry from even applying for asylum when that threshold has recently been met (as is the case right now).
Maybe House Republicans have convinced themselves that any legislation that could appeal to Democrats must, ipso facto, be too reasonable for them to consider. In a twist on the Groucho Marx line, they’d never belong to a club that would have anyone else as a member.
Hard-line Republicans had already begun efforts to punish their own party members who worked on this bipartisan deal, including lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford(Okla.). Poor Lankford reportedly didn’t want this job at all, but he caught the falling knife anyway — and then got stabbed in the back with it.
The bill is too conservative for many Democrats, yet Biden is willing to accept it to get more ammunition to Ukraine’s defenders as part of the package. But Trump wants his political war. The Ukrainians have a real, one on their hands.
Trump is no Marquis de Lafayette, and the Republicans no allies of freedom like the French.
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