Crisis and Hypocrisy

Our border is being flooded by a tsunami of migrants seeking to enter the country. The Border Patrol has no place to put them while they're being processed so they're being packed into holding pens, sometimes at many times the capacity of the facilities. One facility built to hold 250 people is now custodian to 3,889 migrants, meaning it is currently at 1,556 percent capacity.

Others are being shipped to hotels, and still others are being simply let go into the country. We don't know who they are, whether they've got any diseases or criminal record. Our Border Patrol is overwhelmed and can't handle the influx.

The crisis is a direct result of President Biden's decision in the early days of his tenure to dismantle almost all of President Trump's immigration measures, including finishing the border wall, requiring people seeking asylum to apply in their home countries, and requiring others to remain in Mexico until their cases had been adjudicated.

These measures had slowed the tide of illegal immigration to a relative trickle, but Mr. Biden did away with all that and hordes of Central Americans and others from around the world are now pouring across our borders.

The facilities in which they're being housed are deplorable, although the media are loath to point this out after having spent several years of the Trump administration castigating the president for keeping "kids in cages."

                          A photo released by Congressman Henry Cuellar's office

So here's a modest proposal for solving, at least partly, the housing problem: Every person who voted for Joe Biden, including Mr. Biden himself, should offer to open their homes to house and care for one or more immigrants. Mr. Biden owns several capacious houses, and should be happy to open them to the immigrants who came here because they thought he'd welcome them.

The people who voted for him, who professed compassion for the huddled masses and voted Mr. Biden and open borders, can hardly now object that they only favor open borders unless that includes the borders of their own property.

Folks who voted to open the gates of the country to the rest of the world can not reasonably slam shut the doors to their own homes and lock their cars, can they? That would be, well, hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is seriously considering changing some of the traditional Senate rules, the filibuster and the reconciliation rules, to name two. They want to do this so that they'll be able to ram through enormous spending bills as well as bills that would change voting procedures nationwide so as to make it much easier to vote, and, it should be noted, to commit voter fraud.

Yet it wasn't too long ago that many Democrats were opposed to tinkering with the rules. For example, can you guess which Democrat Senator once said this?

I’ve been in the Senate for a long time, and there are plenty of times I would have loved to change this rule or that rule to pass a bill or to confirm a nominee I felt strongly about. But I didn’t, and it was understood that the option of doing so just wasn’t on the table.

You fought political battles; you fought hard; but you fought them within the strictures and requirements of the Senate rules. Despite the short-term pain, that understanding has served both parties well, and provided long-term gain.

Adopting the “nuclear option” would change this fundamental understanding and unbroken practice of what the Senate is all about. Senators would start thinking about changing other rules when they became ‘inconvenient.’

Instead of two-thirds of the vote to change a rule, you’d now have precedent that it only takes a bare majority. Altering Senate rules to help in one political fight or another could become standard operating procedure, which, in my view, would be disastrous.

If you guessed Senator Joe Biden you guessed correctly. So where does Mr. Biden stand now? We'll soon see.