Dem Rep. Pocan: We Didn’t Pass Border Bill When We Held Congress Because ‘We Were Busy’ and There’s a Filibuster

On Wednesday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) responded to a question on why Democrats didn’t pass border legislation when they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House by stating that they were blocked by the filibuster and “we were busy during those two years doing a number of other things.”

Pocan said, “[T]he rules in the Senate, you need 60 votes and no, they didn’t have 60 votes to do something, and that’s part of why we need to figure out a bipartisan solution. When I first came to Congress in 2013, there were 68 votes for a bipartisan compromise that, at that time, Republican Speaker John Boehner refused to take up in the House. So, there’s been a lot of problems over the years.”

He continued, “Secondly, we were busy during those two years doing a number of other things: One, getting us out of COVID, two, investing in our nation’s infrastructure, our roads and bridges and broadband delivery systems, three, we were investing in making things here again in the United States like computer chips and other things that create jobs, and four, we were reducing the cost on health care and on energy costs, things like fighting with prescription drug companies for lower prices and capping the prices on insulin. So, we got a lot done in those two years. But you can’t point to the Trump administration and talk about the infrastructure package they had. They talked. They didn’t deliver. We did deliver in the two years that Democrats had the House, the Senate, and the White House.”

In another part of the segment, Pocan said that there wasn’t any border bill passed during the Trump administration.

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