Hey, remember when everyone was upset because Obama’s deliberately-created border crisis was going to cost taxpayers $2 billion for refugee care? No one should be surprised that the tab has already jumped to $3.7 billion, or that the Republican Party is offering only muted resistance to the spend-a-thon, which includes rather large sums that have absolutely nothing to do with border security. From The Hill:
Hours after the White House revealed the package, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said his goal was to finish a bill by Congress’s August recess.
“The main thing we have to do is recognize that we have an emergency,” Reid said as Democrats broadly offered support for the measure.
Republicans argued the plan did not do enough to secure the border, and several repeated their calls for Obama to send National Guard troops to the border to protect it.
They warned the proposal would fail to address the underlying issues that have led to overcrowded detention centers and long waits for asylum hearings, and used it to attack the White House’s overall approach to immigration, which they said created a perception that the children will be free to stay in the U.S. if they can make it over the border.
“He’s asking for a blank check in effect, $3.7 billion, with no reforms,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Still, few GOP lawmakers balked at the request’s price tag, which climbs to $4.3 billion with the addition of $615 million to help the Agriculture Department fight wildfires in the West.
Many Republicans agreed that increased resources were needed to deal with the issue but said they would push for a larger share of the package to go to border security.
“If you’re going to spend $3.7 billion, let’s make sure we’re not just throwing money at a short-term problem,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who helped negotiate an immigration bill that passed the Senate a year ago. “Let’s make sure it’s broader than that.”
There’s also some of the absurd kabuki theater in which the Administration pretends it really wants to get mass deportations rolling, but its hands are tied by some previously-obscure law from the Bush years, and Democrats pretend to be deeply concerned that Obama supposedly wants to spend money on expedited deportations. It’s amazing how fast that dopey “Bush did it” talking point has propagated through the media. Democrats rolled it out last weekend, and it’s already almost impossible to read a news story without some reference to how Obama is helpless to act in the fact of a law from 2008.
But let’s play the game for a moment, and suppose a law has been lurking on the books for years that essentially committed the United States to absorb the entire population of Central America, once they set foot on American soil. Isn’t that ironclad evidence that this is a deliberate crisis? The Administration knew these laws existed for years, didn’t say a word about them while Obama was writing executive orders for amnesty that brought a wave of aliens to the border, and didn’t warn anyone that we’d have no choice but to usher each and every one of them across the border and give them a bus ticket to the American city of their choice?
Remember, until this weekend, no one from the Administration made a single pronouncement about the border crisis that did not include copious assurances that deportations were right around the corner, and it’s just plumb crazy for the confused people of Honduras and Guatemala to think they could gain indefinite residence in America by dashing across the border with an underage child. But now the story is that it’s been impossible to deport any of them all along, unless you give Obama four billion dollars to spend, in which case he might be willing to “expedite” some deportations, unless his Party activists talk him out of it. (Spoiler alert: they will.)
This whole thing is such a scam. The icing on the cake will be the usual pinata full of pork rolling out from Capitol Hill, with anyone who dares to mount a strong challenge accused of wanting the refugees to die.
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