On Tuesday night, after a long day of very important legal developments for Donald Trump, the former president posted on his Truth Social feed ” ALL A PRESIDENT HAS TO DO IS SAY, “CLOSE THE BORDER” AND THE BORDER WILL BE CLOSED. A COSTLY NEW BILL IS NOT NECESSARY!” This was in response to the total collapse of the Senate border bill which had been painstakingly negotiated of over the last couple of months to meet the demands of the GOP which said they would not advance any funding for Ukraine, Israel or Gaza humanitarian aid unless immigration laws were changed to their specification.
President Biden and the Democrats called their bluff. They agreed to a set of cruel changes to the law and massive new funding for the border and the Republicans blinked, saying they now want to wait until the election to fix what they previously characterized as an existential crisis. All Trump and his MAGA sycophants are left with is this bizarre refrain that a president has magical powers to close the border and refuses to use it.
It never had much of a chance to begin with. A few of the far right crazies in the House thought they could force their own bill HR2 (a ghastly, punitive measure designed to cause as much suffering as possible) down the throats of the Senate and then make Joe Biden crawl on his belly begging for the privilege of signing it. That was never going to happen and in any case, the original MAGA plan was for Senate Democrats to refuse to pass the bill so they could continue to bludgeon them as being weak on immigration and deny Ukraine any more funding. Now they have everyone from the Wall St. Journal to the Chamber of Commerce to the Trump-loving Border Patrol Union begging them to take the deal but they’re hamstrung by their commitment to service their Dear Leader, who openly demanded that they kill the bill for his own purposes.
Trump has been pushing this “the president can just order it done” line for some time, usually when he says that he wants to be a dictator “just for one day.” And it raises the question, obviously, of why in the hell didn’t Donald Trump do that when he was president then? Well, we all know why, and so does he. It’s because the idea that the president can unilaterally “close the border” is complete nonsense.
There was a time when he would commonly exhort to congress to pass border legislation:
The Speaker of the House sang the same tune just a few months ago as did many other Republican officials:
In fact, for the first two years of Trump’s presidency he even had total control over the government and should have been able to pass the kind of legislation they demanded and they did zilch. Immigration actually soared in 2019 to historic highs that were only curbed when the whole world locked down because of COVID. Didn’t anyone tell the president that he could have just “closed the border” with a wave of his tiny regal hand?
In fairness, while it sounds as though he’s exhorting Joe Biden to seize those imaginary powers to close the border, he really isn’t. He reserves that privilege for himself. He’s been much more explicit about what he really wants, telling everyone who will listen that the reason to reject the bill is because it would be a “gift to the Democrats.” In other words, he thinks it will help him win the election to keep the crisis going.
In fact, the opposite is true. The GOP’s antics this week are the real gift to the Democrats. They made utter fools of themselves — again — proving once more that they are inept and dysfunctional. Not only did the Senate Republicans abruptly decide not to vote for the GOP Holy Grail of a bill on Donald Trump’s orders, the House produced one of the biggest clown shows they’ve staged since they won the majority (and that’s saying something.) Speaker Mike Johnson put the vote to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the floor … and he didn’t have the votes. How incompetent can you get?
Evidently, they didn’t anticipate this:
That’s the designated “manager” of the Mayorkas impeachment complaining that the dastardly Democrats didn’t tell the Republicans that Congressman Al Green, D-Tx., who was in the hospital, was planning to attend the vote. When he turned up at the last minute to cast his vote her plan was ruined. But it wasn’t her fault! The Democrats cheated by having enough votes!
President Biden gave a speech earlier in the day after the Senate border bill went down in flames and he made it clear that he was going to make sure the American people know exactly who is to blame for this debacle. He said, “every day between now and November, the American people are gonna know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends.”
I happen to think that this border bill is a draconian nightmare and I can’t say that I’m sorry to see it fail. I understand that the Republicans were holding the fate of Europe hostage with their need to appease Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin by abandoning Ukraine, so I can see why the Democrats were willing to negotiate as they did. But giving in to hostage demands is never a good idea and it wasn’t this time either.
But I do have to wonder if Joe Biden has some preternatural gift for seeing through GOP posturing in these situations. As I’ve noted before, back in 2011 he inserted himself into a negotiation with the Republicans by giving in to their demands for cuts to Social Security and they ended up walking away from that deal in similar fashion to this refusal to take yes for an answer on this border bill. Is it possible that Dark Brandon saw this one coming too?
It doesn’t appear that the economy is going to be the winning issue the Republicans hoped it would be and they certainly can’t rely on abortion or the Supreme Court to motivate their voters anymore. Trump’s favorite campaign strategy is immigrant bashing and they hoped it would be their ace in the hole. I guess we’ll see how that shakes out but it certainly doesn’t look as promising as it did last week. They’ve proved themselves to be incompetent about the issue they want the country to take most seriously.
And Joe Biden isn’t going to let them forget it:
Republicans aren’t the only ones who can use a wedge issue to hammer the opposition.
I would expect to see the president take this whole fiasco right to them at the State of the Union address in a couple of weeks. They will almost certainly act like the hooligans they are and show the American people exactly what they’re being asked to vote for.
Salon