January 17, 2023
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton responded this evening to the federal government’s demand that state troops give U.S. Border Patrol agents access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, the site where three migrants died last week as they tried to cross the Rio Grande.
Aarón Torres and Joseph Morton of The Dallas Morning News reported that Paxton’s letter acknowledged that by law the federal government’s Border Patrol officers are allowed “warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.’” Paxton claimed that this law doesn’t apply because the current administration’s policies—the law, after all, is written by Congress—are not intended to stop undocumented immigration. “There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens,” he wrote.
Torres and Morton note that, in fact, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 142,000 migrants in 2023 and that Paxton presented no evidence for his claims.
Two weeks ago, House Homeland Security Committee chair Mark Green (R-TN) demanded that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testify as part of the House’s impeachment proceedings against him. As Rebecca Beitsch points out in The Hill, testimony from a cabinet secretary is usually arranged several weeks or even months in advance, and Mayorkas said he could not make the date because he will be discussing immigration with a delegation from Mexico at that time but he asked to arrange another time. Mayorkas has testified before the House panel twice in the past year and before Congress 27 times since he took office.
In a letter obtained by Punchbowl News, Green wrote: “Since you continue to decline to come in person, I invite you to submit written testimony for the January 18th hearing record, so that our Committee Members may hear from you directly.”
This evening, an inadvertently circulated internal Republican memo obtained by Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill shows that Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee likely have switched their demand for live testimony to a demand for written answers because they have already committed to impeachment on a tight timeline and cannot wait for the live hearing to be rescheduled.
Green had previously suggested on the Fox News Channel that an impeachment document had already been written even though there had been no impeachment hearings. The memo appears to corroborate that suggestion, saying: “We have scheduled the markup for impeachment articles at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31, 2024.”
Republicans argue that Mayorkas lied to Congress because he said the government has operational control over the border. They dispute this characterization because the Secure Fence Act defines operational control as one in which not a single person or object enters the country improperly. This perfect standard has never been met, and yet they apparently decided to impeach over it before even holding hearings.
Republicans are clearly hoping to use the issue of immigration against President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the upcoming election. After insisting in November that immigration was in such a crisis that there could be no more aid to Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan without it, Republicans in December rejected the idea of new legislation and said Biden must handle the issue himself. Then, in early January, 64 Republicans traveled to the border to demonstrate the importance of the issue.
But now that the Senate appears to have hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform measure, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said this morning: “It’s a complex issue. I don’t think now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform, because we know how complicated that is.” After a meeting at the White House today with President Biden, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and committee heads, Johnson still refused to put the proposed deal up for a vote in the House.
In today’s meeting, Biden emphasized the danger of leaving Ukraine’s defense unfunded. “He was clear,” the White House said, “Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance, and the rest of the free world.”
Johnson is caught between U.S. national security and Trump. On the Fox News Channel tonight, Laura Ingraham told Johnson she had just gotten off a phone call with Trump and Trump had told her that he was against the immigration deal and had urged Johnson to oppose it. “He…was extremely adamant about it,” she said. Johnson agreed and said that he and Trump had been “talking about this pretty frequently.”
Trump needs the issue of immigration to whip up his base for the 2024 election.
Today the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, chaired by James Comer (R-KY) held a hearing titled “The Biden Administration’s Regulatory and Policymaking Efforts to Undermine U.S. Immigration Law.” The administration has asked for additional funding for border patrol officers, immigration courts, and so on, but Comer said in his opening statement that the problem is not a lack of resources but rather an unwillingness to enforce the law.
Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) replied: “You know we have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform up here for decades.” He noted that one of his colleagues had provided statistics showing that President Barack Obama deported more people in each term than Trump did, so “if the border wasn’t a problem until President Biden was elected, then how are we deporting all of these people in administrations before Trump was elected? It’s because this situation has been going on for decades. So stop lying to the American people that none of this happened until President Biden was elected.”
Comer has also used the House Oversight Committee to spread the idea that President Biden is corrupt, but while he has made many allegations on right-wing media channels, the committee has not, in fact, turned up any evidence linking the president to illegal activity. Instead, the investigations there appear to be a continuation of the technique Republicans have used since the 1990s to insinuate that a Democrat has engaged in wrongdoing simply by holding investigations.
Trump employed this technique effectively in 2016 in his constant refrain that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, had illegally deleted emails, and less effectively in 2019 when he tried to strong-arm Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden. It was central to the plan of convincing state legislatures that they could recast their 2020 electoral votes: lawyer Jeffrey Clark wanted to tell them (falsely) that there were voting irregularities that the Department of Justice was investigating.
But this technique has backfired so far in this Congress. After a year of hearing that Biden is corrupt, MAGA Republicans have expected to see him impeached. But Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared and have pushed back on MAGA talking points, turning the tables on the Republicans so thoroughly that Comer recently was forced to back down, saying, “My job was never to impeach.”
Creating a false reality to trick voters is central to undermining democracy, and it is no secret that autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and China are spreading disinformation in the U.S. But I have always wondered what would happen when the American people finally pushed back against suggestions and innuendo and instead demanded actual evidence and policies designed to address problems, as they did before American politics turned into entertainment.
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Notes:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/eoy/iceAnnualReportFY2023.pdf
https://punchbowl.news/article/alejandro-mayorkas-testimony-clashes-with-house-republicans/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4414805-mayorkas-impeachment-gop-memo/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4413501-mike-johnson-immigration-reform/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/politics/biden-ukraine-white-house-meeting/index.html
“Moskowitz: MAGA GOP Wants to Politicize the Border, Not Solve It,” on YouTube
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/14/politics/james-comer-impeachment-interview/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/business/media/election-disinformation-2024.html
Twitter (X):
brianstelter/status/1747787486951080048
Chip Roy said, in July, 2021, that his plan was : “Eighteen more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done. That's what we want." His aim was to win the 2022 elections. Instead, Biden and crew passed bipartisan legislation to improve the lives of Americans.
Now we see the same playbook on immigration—yell about it, but refuse to do anything about it.
As my grandfather used to say “we need to work to get the bums out!” I’m contacting five friends to urge them to make sure that their voter registration is current. I’m suggesting that they each contact 5 friends. When the primary election comes, I’m going to make sure that they vote. The vast majority of registered voters don’t vote. We need to change that this year.
Frump has sucked up so much of the world’s attention, time and energy to feed his empty soul, I reckon if he hiccuped we could power the whole planet for a year.
He is nothing more than a massive drain.