Kamala Harris desperately needs to deflect responsibility for the ongoing debacle at the border, and she thinks she knows just how to do it.
Whenever addressing the issue, she’s sure to accuse Donald Trump of killing the Senate border bill that, in her account, would have locked down the border and thrown away the key.
“It was the strongest border security bill we’ve seen in decades,” Harris intoned during her visit to the border late last week.
“It was endorsed by the border patrol union, and it should be in effect today, producing results in real time — right now for our country.”
Alas, according to Harris, “Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said stop the bill because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
She made much the same case during the debate, and it’s a near-certainty that Tim Walz will attempt a repeat in his Tuesday showdown with JD Vance.
This line of argument, meant to mitigate a key weakness for the Harris-Walz ticket, is shameless on multiple levels.
There’s no doubt that Trump vociferously opposed the Senate bill. But it’s not as though he swooped in and tanked legislation that most Republicans were inclined to support.
Pretty much every border hawk blasted the bill as a travesty on the merits. By the way, a handful of Senate Democrats opposed it, too.
The basic flaw in the Senate bill is that it would have done nothing to reverse, and much to further entrench, the lawless Biden-Harris policy of waving migrants into the United States, never to be seen again.
The law currently says that aliens who demonstrate “credible fear” are supposed to be detained pending their proceedings, whereas aliens who don’t demonstrate such a fear should be detained until they are removed.
The Biden-Harris administration has ignored this statuary scheme as it has engaged in a mass release of illegal immigrants into the United States.
The complete lack of interest in enforcing the law raised the question of why the administration could be trusted to abide by any enforcement provisions in the Senate bill, not that the legislation had much in the way of teeth.
It said that if encounters at the Southern border averaged 5,000 a day over the course of seven days, then the president would get “emergency” authority to expel illegal immigrants.
Loopholes aside, the implicit message of this provision was that daily encounters up to 5,000, an astonishingly high number in historic terms, would somehow be OK.
Since the administration already had more authority to secure the border than it was using, this trigger was unnecessary.
The bill would also have loosened the asylum process to give asylum officers, rather than immigration judges, the ability to grant asylum, and would have written into law the authority to release aliens.
Harris makes much of how the Senate bill would have hired more border patrol agents, but any provisions providing more manpower or resources easily could be passed on their own, without the baggage of the rest of the bill.
The fact is that Biden-Harris administration, with malice aforethought, tore up a border system that was working under Donald Trump, despite being warned of the dire consequences.
The administration kept the floodgates open for years, even when big-city mayors were begging for relief.
Only when the Biden team realized the magnitude of the political gift it was creating for Donald Trump did it pivot to a tougher posture and support the Senate bill.
Apprehensions have declined at the southern border, but the administration has connived to get otherwise inadmissible aliens into the country through various parole programs, which are essentially an accounting gimmick to make the border numbers look better.
This is an artifice, and so is the latest tack from Kamala Harris.
She spoke out forcefully against immigration enforcement just a few years ago, and sponsored numerous bills as a senator to make the system more lax.
On immigration, as so much else, she wants to be something she’s not: She’s a faux border hawk touting a faux border-enforcement bill.
Twitter: @RichLowry
