Speaker of the House Mike Johnson snatched defeat from the jaws of victory again this week for the GOP by both publicly and privately declaring a bipartisan border security bill working through the Senate dead on arrival in the House. This development came as former President Trump pushed GOP members of Congress to derail any border legislation so he could keep the border chaos alive as his top campaign issue.
Meanwhile, the Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee has voted to move forward with articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Because if you refuse to act on border security yourself (and your legislative body has failed to do so for more than three decades), you should most definitely spend weeks and months of Congressional time impeaching the bureaucrat charged to execute the lousy mishmash of executive orders and statute that remain from 30+ years of legislative inertia, and powerless to change himself.
Of course, it shocks no one that Trump is putting himself and his campaign ahead of national priorities. It should be shocking, and upsetting, to American voters to see House Republicans let themselves be played by a candidate who isn’t even close to being the nominee yet.
The truly astonishing result from these intersecting developments is that the Democratic Party has the opportunity to be the sane, strong voice on border security in the 2024 election. This will alienate the progressive wing, but that faction is unlikely to get mad enough to vote for the Republican ticket in response.
A strong stance on border security is not new for the Democrats. Under President Obama, deportations were at an all-time high this century, at levels not matched even by President Trump. This earned Obama criticism from the far left, who referred to him as the Deporter-In-Chief. The problem of unaccompanied minors escalated under his administration, and was worsened when the Trump administration began family separations.
The Biden administration has been plagued by greater demand, global instability, and poor policy against a background of constant alt-right media and digital anti-immigration rhetoric. Combined with continued inaction in Congress, the result is that we are at a crisis point at the border with national emotion on the topic at an all-time high.
Yet the Republicans seem unable to actually legislate around that except by the ultimate in tantrum-throwing: killing bipartisan solutions and impeaching Cabinet members. The former is behavior voters are all too acclimated to, the latter is a dangerous precedent.
The further Congress moves from passing budgets and enacting policy, and dives into personal attacks and political stunts, the worse off we all are.
With regard to immigration and border policy, neither party is winning. Claiming victory while openly refusing to do anything is nothing short of dishonest. Letting the opposition party twist in its own dysfunction is little better.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.