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| Murphy, Anna Moneymaker -- Getty Images |
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appears to be teetering on the edge of a perilous Either/Or: Either the U.S. southern border is secure, or it is not secure.
Only a few weeks ago, the Democrat members of Connecticut’s
U.S. Congressional Delegation were in lockstep agreement that the southern
border was secure. They were citing Cuban-born United States Secretary of
Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to that effect, and Mayorkas’ repeated
postulations left little room for descent within the ranks. Scripts produced in
Washington DC during campaign seasons are rarely disputed once they have been
parceled out to party factotums.
In fact, the border is not secure, and the abandonment of
policy prescriptions during the Biden administration that served to keep
illegal entry numbers low – such as a “remain in Mexico policy” while amnesty
cases were being adjudicated -- has resulted in chaos at the U.S. open border.
Appearing on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe,” a friendly
venue, Murphy told viewers, “The president doesn't have the legal authority,
without additional legislation, to control the border and fix the broken asylum
system in the way that needs to be done… We do see migrants right now living on
the streets, crowding our homeless shelters. Well, this bill specifically
addresses that crisis because it also gives more immediate work authorizations
to immigrants who come to this country and who are legitimately likely to win
their case for asylum.”
David Ignatius of the Washington Post first congratulated
Murphy “on getting this bipartisan deal set in the [Democrat controlled U.S.]
Senate, but then noted there were objections in the Republican controlled U.S.
House.
He asked, “If it ends up getting turned down in the House
and being seemingly stopped in its tracks, do you think that President Biden
should just try to take this issue away from the Republicans who seem to be
playing politics with it and use every bit of his executive authority to address
the border crisis on his own? Say basically, won't pass the legislation? Okay,
I'm going to do it myself.”
It can’t be done, Murphy insisted, unless the U.S. Congress
invests the president with additional authority. He then went on to impute
malign motivation to Republicans who continue to believe that what had been
undone through executive orders by the Biden administration may be redone
through executive orders reestablishing a successful border policy protocol.
“I think Speaker Johnson wants to kill this bill in the
Senate,” Murphy said, “because he knows there will be enormous pressure on him
to call up this bill for a vote in the House because if it passes the Senate
with a big bipartisan vote, where I think there's a very good chance it will,
then there will be the votes to pass this in the House of Representatives. And
if he's not willing to bring this exact bill up, then there will be pressure
from his colleagues in the House who support Ukraine funding to come up with an
alternative.
“So,” Murhy continued, “Speaker Johnson would sort of love
to let this issue lie. He'd love for there to continue to be chaos at the
border so that Donald Trump has a political advantage. He would love to avoid
the question of Ukraine because it splits his caucus, but he will not be able
to avoid that debate if the Senate does its job.”
Chaos at the border, largely the result of a progressive
Democrat administration in denial for the breath and length of the Biden
administration, currently benefits Republicans. Policy is always subservient to
political advantage, except on those rare occasions when the advantage falls to
politically pure at heart Democrats who never, ever, act from base political
motives.
Murphy wants us to believe that policy changes made at the
southern border through executive actions taken by President Joe Biden early in
his campaign cannot be ameliorated by means of a reversal of executive actions.
That seems highly implausible.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, not a politician easily
infested with MAGAism, disagrees on the point and regards the bill avidly
supported by Murphy as, if not a Trojan Horse, then a campaign ploy that, once
enacted, will not settle the enduring border hash.
New data issued 3 months ago disclosed
that, according to a Judiciary Committee report, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) released “at least 2,148,738 illegal aliens into the United
States.”
The committee found that only 5,993 of those encountered at
the southern border were placed in removal proceedings. “In other words, of the
at least 2.1 million aliens released into the United States since January 20,
2021, the Biden administration has failed to remove, through immigration court
removal proceedings, roughly 99.7% of those illegal aliens,” the report says.
The report notes that an additional 1.7 million “known
‘gotaways’” successfully evaded Border Patrol agents and entered the United
States, bringing the total estimated number of illegal aliens who arrived and
stayed under the Biden administration to 3.8 million. That population exceeds
the number of residents of 22 different states and the District of Columbia.
Some may regard such belated admissions of culpability as a
positive sign that the border has not been secure since the beginning of the
Biden administration’s dismantling of useful border protocols.
The way to stop a leak in the border bucket is to patch the
leak first before allowing new illegal entries to further flood the border. We
know that normalizing illegal entries will not in the long run reduce the flow,
just as we know that normalizing bank robberies will not persuade criminals
from robbing banks.
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