The migrant crisis is blowing up in President Biden’s face, so of course he’s blaming Republicans.
“For too long, we all know the border’s been broken,” he says . . . now.
Heck, he claims he’s been saying so for years, but needs authority from Congress to fix it, pointing the deal that died in the Senate the other week.
Why does he insist on telling lies that nobody can possibly believe?
Not that he’s alone:
Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas whines, “We don’t bear responsibility for a broken system,” and “fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”
And never mind how he, Biden and the rest of their crew have spent the last three years repeatedly saying the border is “secure.”
Look: They’ve been in power for over three years, with outside critics (hi!) screaming the whole way about the ever-growing migrant tide; Biden’s party controlled Congress his first two years — but this is the first they’ve talked about legislation that even tries to tighten the rules.
Which, of course, they themselves loosened.
Biden ran on overturning the last guy’s border policies and started his first day in office, reinstating “catch and release,” ending the “remain in Mexico” program and halting construction of the border wall. (His team later even made a point of selling off the construction materials.)
To be fair, there’s some truth in his claims to have seen the problem long ago.
Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician” revealed that just two months into his administration, Biden was irate over how his campaign promises were translating into reality, and argued with staff for months about raising the cap on how many illegal migrants to admit.
“They want me to increase the number of people in the country, but that’s kind of crazy,” Foer reports the prez whined to his old pal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Crazy it was — but as his staff kept pushing and the left erupted, he did it.
Inside the White House, the infighting continued; recent Axios reporting has Biden’s team at each other’s throats throughout the years that followed.
While publicly the prez has insisted everything’s fine.
The White House used to insist the rise was just “seasonal,” and later pointed to one-month declines as turning points — yet every month of this presidency “border encounters” have surpassed the same month in the previous year.
The influx has broadened, too: Back when Vice President Kamala Harris got named “border czar,” it was from Mexico and the three Central American “southern triangle” nations; Venezuelans, Haitians and others soon joined the tide.
Many now come from Africa and Asia.
Today, after years of telling the public everything is fine, even as he screamed at his staff about what a mess it was, Biden says it’s Republicans’ fault, telling them to “show some spine” by voting for the Senate deal that would kosherize anything below 5,000 illegal crossing a day — vastly far above the 1,000 a day that Jeh Johnson, the Obama chief of Homeland Security, called a “crisis” level.
Meaning the president still isn’t seeking a real solution (like the wholesale reforms of the House-passed border bill, HR-2) but political cover.
For three years, Biden has been reciting the narcissist’s prayer: It isn’t happening. If it is happening, it’s not that bad. If it is bad, it wasn’t my fault.
But voters see right through it: Six in 10 blame him for the chaos at the border.
He can blame-shift all he wants, but he alone owns this crisis: He chose it with his eyes wide open.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
