Thanos
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Leave it to Catherine Rumpell with the Washington Post to keep it real regarding the current border protection bill. --
Welp, the dog caught the car again. After months — decades? — of running on tightening the border, House Republicans are suddenly paralyzed when offered the chance to do so.
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
Maybe GOP lawmakers genuinely think they should hold out for the more draconian bill they put forward last year, known as H.R. 2. There are two major problems with this strategy: First, H.R. 2 would not supply funding for pretty much anything that could stop border crossings.
Second, it would almost certainly never become law — even if Republicans were to gain control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) himself has pointed this out. (For procedural reasons, the bill would need 60 votes, which it could not get.)
Welp, the dog caught the car again. After months — decades? — of running on tightening the border, House Republicans are suddenly paralyzed when offered the chance to do so.
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
- beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
- a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
- hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
- huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
- reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
Maybe GOP lawmakers genuinely think they should hold out for the more draconian bill they put forward last year, known as H.R. 2. There are two major problems with this strategy: First, H.R. 2 would not supply funding for pretty much anything that could stop border crossings.
Second, it would almost certainly never become law — even if Republicans were to gain control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) himself has pointed this out. (For procedural reasons, the bill would need 60 votes, which it could not get.)
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