[ad_1]
- Donald Trump said Monday that “we don’t need a border bill” to stop the flow at the border. President Trump added on Wednesday morning: “Close the southern border, we don’t need a bill!!!”
- House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said over the weekend that “President Biden falsely claimed yesterday that Congress would need to pass new legislation to authorize the closure of the southern border.”
- “We don’t need a border bill,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said late last week.
- “We don’t need new laws, we just need a president to enforce the laws we already have,” said South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R). Said.
- “We don’t need new laws to secure our borders. If Biden fully reinstates Trump policies, this crisis will end immediately,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida). Said.
- “We don’t need a new bill. We need something to get Biden to enforce the law,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). Said.
- “The idea that we need Congress to do anything to secure our southern border is complete horse shit,” said Rep. Troy E. Neals (R-Texas). Added Tuesday.
This debate would have been news to some of these same Republicans just a few years or even months ago. Many recognized that even under President Trump’s leadership there was a border “crisis” and the need for legislation to address it.
Mr. Cruz explained in detail. Last week, he said there was no need for a bill today because our country’s illegal immigration rate was “the lowest it’s been in 45 years under President Donald Trump.” The difference was that we had a president who wanted to secure the border. ”
Cruz’s comments appear to be referring to the early years of Trump’s presidency, when border insecurity in the Southwest fell to a 40-year low, as it had in the years before under President Barack Obama. However, this was not the case with Trump’s subsequent inauguration. In fact, even though President Trump has been in power for years and appeared to have a strong desire to secure the border, President Cruz recognized a “crisis” in 2019 and said the bill was needed. insisted.
“I went to Congress to work with Republicans to convince my Democratic colleagues that there is a serious crisis at the border and that we need to work with Republicans to take action now,” Cruz said in a July 2019 Fox News op-ed. I will continue to work tirelessly.”
Cruz called Congress’ failure to act “irresponsible, unjust and callous to ignore the ongoing crisis.”
Trump believed the bill was necessary at the time, but his own authority clearly wasn’t enough to stem the tide.
“The only long-term solution to the crisis, and the only way to ensure our country’s staying power as a sovereign nation, is for Congress to overcome the obstacles to opening our borders,” he said in November 2018.
In July 2019, President Trump pointed to some of the specific types of bills that Senate negotiators were currently working on. It’s a change to asylum law that President Trump called “outdated.”
“What Democrats need to do now is change the loophole,” he said. “They should change their asylum.”
“Most importantly, Democrats must reform immigration law now,” he said in April 2019.
Rubio has also repeatedly called for Congress to reform refugee law, most recently in early 2023.
“We have to redo asylum law,” he said. “They are being abused.”
“Asylum criteria need to change,” he added in May.
Johnson’s comments on this are a little more nuanced. At one point he flatly suggested that new legislation was not needed, but at other points he said that President Biden could do much through executive action and that Biden’s failure to do so was due to good faith or actual desire. Sometimes it just showed what was missing. .
But Johnson has also repeatedly said in the past that Parliament has an important, if unique, role to play.
In 2018 and 2019, he called on Congress to close “loopholes” in response to the Trump-era border “crisis.” He introduced legislation to overhaul the asylum process, calling it an “important step.”
In February 2023, Prime Minister Johnson said, “Our immigration system is broken. It’s Parliament’s job to reform it.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) made similar comments in 2019 during Trump’s presidency.
“This is a broken system and we need to fix it,” Scalise said at the time. “That requires action from Congress. The law needs to change.”
The new issue is part of a two-pronged effort to focus on the Biden administration’s handling of existing immigration laws, rather than legislation.
House Republicans introduced articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas early Wednesday morning. He could soon become the second Cabinet secretary in history to be impeached. The article cites his alleged “deliberate and systematic refusal to comply with the law.” Even some voices, usually aligned with Republicans, say Mayorkas’ alleged crimes do not meet the constitutional impeachment standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The situation at the border today is clearly worse than at any point during Trump’s presidency. But even if President Trump’s term includes a crisis that requires Congress to pass new legislation, it’s hard to argue that all we need now is a president willing to sign some kind of executive order. difficult. (It’s also worth noting that many of President Trump’s orders have been invalidated by courts.)
And if the asylum process was so broken at the time that it needed a legal overhaul, it cannot be argued that there is no need for legislation to address it now that asylum has not changed much since then. Perhaps it will not solve all the problems, and there may be a role for administrative action.
But suddenly the argument arises that we don’t need the law. With the Democratic-controlled Senate uncertain, it is understandable to see this as an excuse to capitulate to President Trump, who has urged Republicans to veto anything but hard-line legislation passed by the House of Representatives.
[ad_2]
Source link