Friday, March 10, 2023

Editorial: GOP’s Borderline Failure

 We had low expectations when the slim Republican House majority took 15 votes before they could settle on a speaker, and so far they have demonstrated they have no plans for making life better for working families, as they seek to govern by publicity stunts. The Border “Debate” is a case in point.

New House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in February took a convoy that included more than a dozen Republican Congress members to the border between Arizona and Mexico near Yuma to bring attention to the hordes of aliens they claim seek to invade the US. 

“As they rumbled along the entry port of San Luis, a dam along the Colorado River and more desolate sections of the U.S. border between Arizona and Mexico, though, their search came up empty,” a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter on the scene described. “Hours later, immigration officials would spot a group crossing north, but it was long after Congress members had retired for the night.”

No Democrats participated in what ranking committee Democrat Jerry Nadler called a “stunt hearing,” though he did say some Democrats from the committee would go to the border in March to “hear from the community and government officials on the ground.”

The Judiciary “field hearing” was the third trip to the border by House Republicans, as Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy had already traveled there to score points, as had members of the Energy and Conference Committee, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos.com. 

The Homeland Security Committee had what they called a “border bootcamp” for Republican freshmen members, and the Oversight Committee has plans to go in the near future, too. “That’s one way to stop illegal crossings: Just keep sending down convoys of GOP representatives to play border patrol,” McCarter noted.

But all that travel adds up, she noted. Jordan’s Judiciary Committee alone has requested $262,400 for travel this session. In 2022, with Democrats in charge, the committee spent $7,986.

Republicans complain the border is open and refugees keep showing up — but those “open border” claims are heard in Central and South America as an invitation. And those refugees are disappointed when they get to the border and find the Republicans lied.

In fact, federal agents along the southern border stopped migrants over 2.3 million times, a record high, in fiscal year 2022. And the number of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol after illegally crossing the southern border dropped by roughly 40% in January, when the Biden administration announced a revamped strategy to discourage unlawful crossings.

In early January, the administration announced it would use a pandemic-related authority known as Title 42 to swiftly expel Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans to Mexico without allowing them to seek asylum if they attempted to cross into the US without legal permission, CBS News reported.

Facts also undermine Republican claims that Biden’s lax attention to the border is responsible for the increase in fentanyl deaths in the US. In fact, Customs and Border Patrol are seizing record amounts of fentanyl at the border, and most mugglers are US citizens. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2019-2021, fentanyl seizures at ports of entry nationwide quadrupled to 14,700 pounds as the US government’s ban on most legal cross-border traffic amid the public health emergency prompted narcotics traffickers to move the easier-to-conceal synthetic opioid, fentanyl.

In fiscal year 2022, 84% of the 14,104 pounds of fentanyl seized along the Mexican border were seized at ports of entry.

The Border Patrol seized 2,200 pounds of fentanyl, or 16% of all fentanyl seized along the southern border, in fiscal year 2022. And many of those seizures occurred at interior checkpoints, where Border Patrol agents screen commercial and passenger vehicles.

When it comes to actual border policy, rather than publicity and preening, Republicans have nothing. Instead, they’ve got an interparty fight, as Gabe Ortiz reported at Daily Kos Feb. 20. Their first go at an immigration bill “was so extreme it derailed itself, after so-called moderates refused to sign on.” 

One of the “moderates,” US Rep. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, condemned fellow Texas US Rep. Chip Roy’s bill gutting US asylum rules early on as “not Christian” and “very anti-American.” Gonzales added in a tweet, “Anyone who thinks a 3 page anti-immigration bill with 0% chance of getting signed into law is going to solve the border crisis should be buying beach front property in AZ.” 

Talk like that, and a few votes that strayed from the party line, got Gonzales censured by the Republican Party of Texas, whose executive committee voted 57-5 March 3 to cite him for “lack of fidelity to Republican principles and priorities,” such as his vote for the modest gun bill that passed last year after the Uvalde school shooting in his district, as well as a bill codifying protections for same-sex marriage, and against the House Republicans’ rules package. He is in his second term representing the predominantly Hispanic West Texas district and the censure allows the party, which is otherwise required to remain neutral in intraparty contests, to support a challenger in Gonzales’ next primary. Two days later, Julie Clark, chairwoman of the Medina County GOP, where the censure resolution originated, announced she would challenge him, calling Gonzales “a real RINO!”

The GOP move against Gonzales might signal the growing Latino electorate in Texas to reconsider their recent move toward the party whose most recent president repeatedly cast slurs on Mexican and other dark-skinned immigrants. Donald Trump may have put a target on their back for armed White supremacists who don’t see much difference between illegal immigrants and brown-skinned US citizens. 

Trump started his campaign in 2015 saying Mexicans were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” At rallies before the 2018 elections, Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally.

Nine months later, on Aug. 3, 2019, a 21-year-old White man from a Dallas suburb opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people and injuring 22 more, after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” that is part of a “great replacement” of White people by people of color. Nearly all the victims had Latino last names, but many were US citizens. The shooter pleaded guilty in federal court to 90 crimes in connection with the massacre. 

Texas Republican leaders deny Trump inspired the El Paso massacre or other attacks against Latinos, but Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott has the party’s support in his figurative war on immigrants, as he has sent the National Guard to support the Border Patrol, at a cost to Texas of more than $4 billion over the past two years. That includes $163 million for a border wall and $40 million to bus migrants north to Democrat-led cities. Meanwhile, Texas businesses complain they can’t find workers and Republican legislators are considering state tax credits to encourage more native births. — JMC 



From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2023


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Selections from the April 1, 2023 issue

 COVER/Thom Hartmann

The outrageous new way Big Pharma is trying to rip us all off

EDITORIAL
GOP’s borderline failure


FRANK LINGO
Wind farms should tread carefully

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Satire: Just a tool for democracy

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMIllen
Chinese balloons come and go down

DISPATCHES
Trump to his followers: I am your retribution. 
Don Jr. confirms ‘Dark Brandon’ has been living in Trump’s head.
Poll finds majority of US voters want Fed to stop raising rates before it tanks economy.
Major US oil companies raked in $290 billion in profits last year. 
‘New’ House Republican energy plan: Drill, baby, drill.
Trump has a vision for the future, and it’s ‘The Jetsons.’ 
Florida Republicans want to keep track of bloggers ...

ART CULLEN
Farm Bill could be a rare accomplishment for a divided Congress

ALAN GUEBERT
Paying the price for being sick, old, or poor in rural America


REBEKAH ENTRALGO
Rail workers warned us: Greed is dangerous

JOHN YOUNG
Biden arrives to save planet tied to tracks

ROBERT KUTTNER
A small victory over Big Pharma / How Monopoly Destroys Democracy


DICK POLMAN
The Fox rot starts at the top with Rupert Murdoch 

TOM CONWAY
Working kids to death


DOMENICA GHANEM 
The GOP wants to renegotiate women’s place in the economy


JAKE JOHNSON
Report shows big insurance profitting massively from Medicare privatization

LES LEOPOLD
Shareholder capitalism and the cruelty of mass layoffs

SONALI KOLHATKAR
Starbucks: Poster child for corporate abuse


DR. CINTLI 
The consequential debate of 1524: On what it means to be human. Part I.

GENE NICHOL
Crushing judicial independence in North Carolina

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The government: Erasing the X in prescribing Buprenorphine

SAM URETSKY
Republicans prefer to remain fast asleep

SETH SANDRONSKY
Seeking justice: California’s sterilization compensation program

WAYNE O’LEARY
Casey Jones meets Hunter Harrison

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Blowback from stock buybacks


MEL GURTOV
The coup in Israel


BARRY FRIEDMAN 
Oklahoma’s education horror

SATIRE/Rosie Sorenson
D-I-V-O-R-C-E


DAVE MARSTON 
Colorado conflicted about cutting its water use

ROB PATTERSON 
The rich have their uses

PETER FUNT
Viewers should ask, what’s up with docs?

FILM REVIEW/Ed Rampell  
‘Ithaka’ makes a personal appeal to free Assange

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2023


Populist.com

Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links

About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us


Copyright © 2023 The Progressive Populist