What on Earth is the congressional GOP thinking?
Reports indicate the White House and Republicans in Congress are at work on a deal that would tighten border security in exchange for okaying aid to Ukraine — and that a major bone of contention is whether to set a trigger point for expedited migrant removals when illegal crossings hit 3,000 or 5,000 per day.
Huh?
If Washington can tell border agents to stop waving in illegals when the total hits some arbitrary threshold, then it can tell them to do it from the get-go.
In other words, by dickering over just how many illegal migrants can come through in a day before the door slams shut, the Biden administration has at long last said the quiet part out loud: The law doesn’t actually require treating the word “asylum” as a magic “Open sesame.”
Yes, the border can be closed.
It’s open because President Biden opted to appease the left wing of the Democratic Party, which wants open borders however it can get them.
Look: The law says every illegal entrant must be detained until “final determination” of their status; all the evidence indicates the vast majority don’t have legitimate asylum claims.
GOP efforts to “compromise” here (in order to reduce the overall time) would endorse the plainly illegal policy that Biden adopted on Day 1 of his administration.
And even the 3,000-in-a-day trigger would still add more than 1 million to the country per year — people without employment, shelter or other key resources.
So adopting real border security would not be Biden “selling out,” as disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) called it last week. (And he really should know better, given the pile of gold bars that show how for-sale he is.)
Rather, Biden is selling out the whole country with his “Wave them in” policy.
He and his flunkies invite millions in and leave inundated border towns and big cities to fend for themselves.
Getting that aid to Ukraine (and to Israel, along with funds to beef up US defense procurement) is vital, but so is ending the border madness.
If Republicans can’t get Biden to take the obvious deal, they must at least avoid any “compromise” that codifies his twisting of the law.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
