Senate Dems: Let Us Help Write Border Bill. Senate GOP: YGBFKM (Update)

I knew Democrats were clowns on immigration. Heck, they spent the last four years proving it, so much so that their border czar Kamala Harris didn’t gain any ground in a single county in the last election over 2020.

I didn’t realize that Senate Democrats were comedians. They apparently have Senate Republicans in stitches over the suggestion that they have anything of value to contribute to new legislation about border security:

The push came in a Jan. 22 letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., which was led by Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and signed by 12 other Democrats, mostly from politically competitive states.

“We understand that Senate Republicans have discussed using the budget reconciliation process to advance border security budget measures without any Democratic input. While that’s your right, in working together on a bipartisan basis, we can achieve the best outcome for the American people,” the Democrats wrote. “We remain ready to work with you in good faith to craft legislation that can achieve bipartisan support and 60 votes in the Senate.”

That got a real LOL from Ron Johnson. The interviewer informed the Wisconsin Republican of the offer, and noted that their interest in border security seemed somewhat … sudden:

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., laughed out loud when asked about the letter and whether Republicans might accept their overture.

“That’s a letter we will ignore,” Johnson said in an interview. “We’re not going to wait for them. If they want to secure the border, they could have done that,” he added. “That’s not what they want.”

Lindsey Graham didn’t laugh out loud when NBC News asked him about the offer, but he rejected it out of hand, at least on the border security part of immigration reform. Graham believes that the Senate GOP can use reconciliation to finally take border security and immigration enforcement out of the hands of Democrats, and they plan to at least try. Given Graham’s earlier efforts on bipartisan immigration reform, that rejection speaks volumes.

Republicans have gotten burned on this issue repeatedly. Democrats spent years playing them as racists for wanting the border secured and illegals deported, but Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office made it clear that Donald Trump and the GOP are the mainstream point of view on illegal immigration, and that voters consider Democrats incompetent or worse on the issue. That’s why several Democrats rejected their leadership to vote for the Laken Riley Act, after having attempted to hijack it last year to push for relaxing asylum rules and enshrining stampede-levels of illegal border crossings as thresholds for “emergency” treatment. 

NBC also notes why Democrats have suddenly found an interest in getting on the right side of immigration enforcement:

Democrats in battleground states and districts are breaking with the bulk of their party on immigration, as they believe that the positions of progressives and leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are out of touch with their voters. The rightward shift comes after Democrats got clobbered on the issue of immigration in the 2024 election, and lost Latino men to Trump.

They got clobbered because they’re out of touch, but NBC doesn’t explain why they fell out of touch. It’s because voters in all demos saw what Democrats do when they are in charge of the border and immigration enforcement, which is to ignore the former and refuse to do the latter. That’s no exaggeration either; Democrats’ compromise position for immigration was to allow 2500 illegal entries per day in exchange for a gauzy promise to maybe build the wall at some point in the future. That bill, which Democrats basically dictated to Republicans, only authorized spending enough money to build a whopping 14 miles of the wall.

Kamala Harris scolded Trump for not agreeing to Democrat terms on that bill. Harris also claimed that was the cause of the border crisis that only magically appeared two-plus years earlier when she and Biden took office. Voters kicked Kamala’s rear end out of office, largely on that basis. Is it any wonder that Republicans have no interest in going back to Democrats for guidance now?

Passing this on reconciliation will be difficult, but not impossible. If Democrats want to help take credit for real border security and immigration enforcement, they can vote to pass it and take their share of the credit for its passage. But pardon us if we don’t think Democrats have anything of value to add to fixing a problem they turned into a disaster with their previous ideas about the border and immigration. 

Update: At the Free Press, Nellie Bowles indirectly explains how ludicrous this request is, in her usual humorous fashion:

It turns out people are furious about the border. Nearly 90 percent of Americans have views that nearly 100 percent of newsrooms would find shocking and abhorrent. American views about immigration are so right-wing, I’m realizing I’m a liberal again. …

Yes: 55 percent of Americans want all illegal immigrants deported. That is millions of people, many of whom have been here for decades, rounded up in an unprecedented population shift. This used to be considered an extremely radical position.

It turns out that Joe Biden’s immigration policy was so unhinged, it made even normie liberals flip. Joe Biden’s open border policy—and the gaslighting his supporters performed to pretend there was no policy shift—drove America en masse, like a migrant surge, to want extremely hardcore border control. Now everyone is a Texas border cop with some dip under their lip and some barbed wire in the truck. Suburban moms are seeing an Italian family and calling ICE. They’re visiting Amish country and trying to send those butter churners back to Germany.

Democrats still have no idea just how badly Biden and Harris destroyed their credibility with the American electorate, especially on immigration. They spent four years living with the consequences of progressive open-border policies, and are “furious” with the results and Democrat dishonesty about it.