Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer wants a vote next week on President Biden’s request for $106 billion in emergency spending for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and border security. Schumer’s desire gives Senate Republicans leverage to force Biden finally to properly address the border security crisis he created. If Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues hold firm, the Democrats’ choice will be simple – agree to border policy changes that will actually secure the border and, in exchange, earn support for the aid Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan need; or refuse to make the necessary changes to border policy and see the aid request defeated.
Biden requested the funding more than a month ago. He asked for $61.4 billion for Ukraine, $14.3 billion for Israel, $13.6 billion for “border security,” $11.2 billion for humanitarian assistance, and $5.4 billion for Indo-Pacific aid and submarine capacity.
But Biden’s request for “border security” wasn’t a request for funding to secure the border. It was a request for funding to process illegal aliens into our country faster. He doesn’t aim to reduce the record-level flow of illegal aliens; he simply aims to move them along faster. And he wants Congress to send billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out so-called “sanctuary cities” like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, which have been spending their own taxpayers’ dollars on the massive influx of illegal aliens caused by Biden’s open-borders policies. So taxpayers in Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and Wyoming – who didn’t make or support bad decisions like the ones made by leaders in Blue States and Blue Cities to throw out the welcome mat for illegal aliens – would, under Biden’s request, pay for those bad decisions.
Senate Republicans countered. Two weeks after Biden made his request, Senators Lindsay Graham and James Lankford released a wide-ranging set of border security proposals based on H.R. 2, the “Secure the Border Act” that passed the House in May. Their plan called for resuming construction on the U.S.-Mexico border wall, restricting humanitarian parole to its original intended purpose and case-by-case granting, and raising the threshold to qualify for asylum to make it harder for those who have no legitimate claim to enter and remain in the country.
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Releasing the proposal, Lankford noted that even Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas had said at a hearing recently that “the asylum system needs to be reformed from top to bottom.”
Said McConnell, “National security begins with border security. And any serious supplemental legislation with a shot of passing the Senate in the coming weeks will have to take meaningful steps toward fixing the Biden Administration’s border crisis.”
Senate Democrats seemed to be under the impression that Republicans were reopening long-dormant discussions over immigration policy reform. Some even talked about legalizing the so-called “Dreamers,” illegal aliens who came to the United States as children.
Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton knocked that down before Thanksgiving, saying the negotiations were not “very close yet, because Democrats have not yet accepted that the negotiations are not border security for Democratic immigration priorities. It’s border security for Ukraine aid.”
On Wednesday afternoon, House and Senate conservatives gathered for a press conference to press hard for strong border security provisions.
Said Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, “I want to be unequivocally clear – to the Speaker of the House, to Republican leadership, if the word ‘Ukraine’ is uttered on the floor of the House of Representative before we have secured the border, passed H.R. 2 out of the Senate, with the president signing it, with metrics attached, that is an utter fail by Republicans.”
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson saw Roy and raised him: “In the hands of a president that actually wanted to secure the border, in the hands of an administration that would faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress, H.R. 2 would work. But we don’t have that with this administration. Our open border, Biden’s open border, is a clear and present danger to America. And no matter what we pass legislatively, we can’t trust the president and his administration to faithfully execute that law. So we have one leverage point here: The administration wants funding for Ukraine. We need to use that leverage point. And we need to make any funds that go to Ukraine contingent on the administration actually reducing the number of migrants that are being dispersed in America.”
Johnson continued: “So what the Senate must insist on is, if they take up a supplemental, if they’re looking at funding for Ukraine, Republicans in the Senate must hold firm and deny cloture on any bill that doesn’t include benchmarks, hard metrics, and, again, the metric needs to be number of migrants dispersed into America, whether they’re encountered, processed, and dispersed, or ‘detectable gotaways’, or any other category. And we need to deny cloture on any bill that doesn’t include that hard metric … We need to be more concerned about securing our own border, protecting our own citizens, our own homeland, before we provide $60 billion in funding for Ukraine.”
In the course of my work, I travel a great deal, and I spend a great deal of time on airplanes. And every time, I hear the same warning before the flight – in the event of an emergency that causes oxygen masks to drop from the ceilings, I am to make sure I have my own mask securely in place and working before I seek to assist others.
I’m not an expert on international relations, but I can’t help but wonder – why is dealing with various crises any different? Shouldn’t we put on our own oxygen mask first, before we concern ourselves with helping others? Shouldn’t we make sure we have our own border crisis resolved before we worry about other crises in far-off lands?
It sure seems that way to me. Chip Roy and Ron Johnson are right.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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