Biden-crushers: Abbott dealt the knockout, and Trump the death blow -NYT
By Monica Showalter
Joe Biden's immigration failure has been well-known on the right, even as leftists and their media allies told us it was not a problem.
Well, it was a problem, as some in the Biden White House knew and now the New York Times is telling their breathy whispery anonymous story that is nevertheless good readin' for those of us who had been paying attention.
The Times frames it in a way establishmentarian leftists might like -- with Joe Biden the key player who ignored warnings from his trusty aides about the dangers of an open border. The old fool, after all, is easy to kick around now.
While I have no doubt Biden ignored a lot of stuff, and much of the open border story was quite intentional ...
... it buries the lede on the real story: That Texas's governor, Greg Abbott, was the most effective agent in destroying Joe Biden's open-borders immigration agenda, one that ruined it so badly there was no political return for Biden. And that's coming from the weasel-like Democrat operatives in the bowels of Bidendom.
This is where the news was:
One April day in 2022, a bus pulled up near the U.S. Capitol. It was carrying 12 Venezuelans, four Colombians, four Cubans and four Nicaraguans — and the start of a new phase in the immigration debate.
The bus had been chartered by the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “By busing migrants to Washington, D.C., the Biden administration will be able to more immediately meet the needs of the people they are allowing to cross our border,” Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, said in a statement at the time.
...
By the end of 2022, Texas had sent more than 16,000 migrants to [New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, and later, Denver], according to data obtained by The Times last year through a records request.
The Biden administration accused Mr. Abbott of a cruel stunt. But the campaign worked. Until then, the White House viewed the migration crisis mainly as a problem for border states, former aides said. When migrants began making headlines in places like New York, that view changed.
Many Biden officials came to view Mr. Abbott’s campaign as the point Democrats lost the debate.
“I don’t think we ever recovered,” said Deborah Fleischaker, then the assistant director for policy at ICE.
Abbott understood that with the 'material' Joe Biden was hurling at him, he could take the issue national, not by talking or media appearances, but by simply busing the open border's newcomers to the big blue cities with the loudest sanctuary policies. They could deal with the crime, chaos, and 'culture' firsthand for themselves and leave him less of a problem.
It worked.
It was enough to flip the whole country to Trump as Biden snoozed through it.
Meanwhile, a day-late, dollar-short Democrat effort in Congress to save their skins by normalizing the open border, with 1,000 "free" border crossings a day (the Times claimed it was just about restricting easy fake asylum claims) fell apart in Congress. They almost had what they wanted until President Trump stepped forward and said the "bipartisan" bill stunk.
According to the Times:
On a Sunday evening in February 2024, Senator Christopher S. Murphy was in his Capitol Hill office, watching the collapse of the Biden administration’s last best chance to manage its immigration problem.
Mr. Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, had led his party’s negotiations over a bill to fix the border crisis by giving the government authority to restrict asylum claims. The bill had taken Mr. Murphy and his Republican counterpart, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, months to agree upon.
Within hours, as Mr. Murphy watched Republicans attack the bill on social media, he knew it would fail. Early the next day, Mr. Trump delivered the death blow. “This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats,” he wrote on social media. He added: “It takes the HORRIBLE JOB the Democrats have done on Immigration and the Border, absolves them, and puts it all squarely on the shoulders of Republicans. Don’t be STUPID!!!” |
