Either Republicans use the best tool they have to force Biden’s hand, or they are aiders and abettors.
Either Republicans use the best tool they have to force Biden’s hand, or they are aiders and abettors.
Y ou probably don’t want to hear this again, but at this stage, the only thing that might — might — turn the tide and establish a semblance of security at the southern border would be for House Republicans to impeach President Biden for first causing the border crisis and then, over the course of the next two years, willfully exacerbating it, not out of incompetence but because it’s what his radical base demands.
The Supreme Court was never going to relieve congressional Republicans of their burden. The Court is powerless to secure the border. Its institutional legitimacy and, hence, its power lie in rendering sound judgment rooted in law and fact. Republican attorneys general were pleading with the justices to sustain a lie, namely, that we are still in the throes of a pandemic calling for extraordinary measures that include turning aliens away based on the Title 42 exclusion — an infectious-disease pretext, not a border-security policy.
Sound judgment can never be founded in such falsehoods. The justices wrung their hands for a couple of months. Sure, they knew the Title 42 claim was bogus, as Justice Neil Gorsuch bluntly said it was in a dissenting opinion in late December. But like any other rational person, they did not want to be blamed — as they knew they would be by our insidious, AWOL political class — for the overrunning of the border that even the Biden Justice Department admits will inevitably follow the lifting of Title 42 (specifically, section 265 of Title 42, U.S. Code). So a narrow majority settled on some hocus pocus meant to string matters out for a few more months.
Then, however, the administration announced that the Covid emergency would be formally ended on May 11, 2023, and there was no longer even a fig leaf for retaining the Title 42 fiction in the litigation.
The Court has not yet granted the Biden administration’s plea that it dismiss the case brought by 19 states — states that are desperate not for Title 42 to remain in place but for real border security. This week, though, the justices quietly informed the parties that oral argument would not take place as scheduled on March 1. Beyond that, the Court will likely do nothing for now. The matter will hang in limbo so the justices can see whether the president actually follows through and allows the Covid emergency to expire. Biden has been known to exploit the fiction of a lingering emergency when it serves the Left’s objectives, so prudence says you should believe the end of this one when you see it. But once Title 42 is conclusively lifted, the case will be dismissed as moot.
Of course, the border won’t be moot. It will be erased, even less visible than the palimpsest barrier over which 6 million pairs of footprints have stomped since Biden took the oath of office 25 months ago.
That’s why you can’t blame the states for their desperate but meritless pleas to the Court. For over a century, judicial rulings and congressional Democrats have nullified their powers to uphold the rule of law against trespassers. If the Court won’t help them, the states must rely on Biden, and it is Biden who has quite intentionally left the border defenseless, knowing full well that the states would be besieged.
This is no longer just a problem for red states, either. The costs of unchecked illegal immigration — the drain on health-care systems, schools, welfare services, sanitation, police departments, courts, etc. — now plague even states whose Democratic ruling classes have encouraged Biden to ignore the catastrophe. Their “sanctuary cities” now mewl about deepening budget crises that are entirely of their own making. Witness New York, where Mayor Eric Adams suddenly finds a $4.2 billion hole in his budget because the Big Apple somehow believed it could keep a safe 2,000-mile distance from the inferno Democrats were stoking.
Mark Krikorian of the invaluable Center for Immigration Studies explains in the New York Post that the lifetime cost to American taxpayers of each illegal alien is about $80,000. By conservative estimates, the 3 million or so illegal aliens Biden has lawlessly paroled into the country (out of the additional millions who have been enticed by his non-enforcement policies to seek entry, exhausting security resources) will cost about $200 billion. Even if the siege stopped today, that would not be sustainable. And it is most definitely not stopping today; if anything, it will only get worse once Title 42 ends in the coming weeks. The resulting surge could multiply the influx by a factor of two or three. How much more do you suppose a country $31 trillion in debt (and on a trajectory to reach $51 trillion in debt over the next decade) can handle?
Congressional Republicans seem to grasp that, at this point, the only solution is impeachment, the position advocated by three former government officials and top Heritage Foundation analysts — Hans von Spakovsky, Lora Ries, and Steven G. Bradbury — in a recent Fox News op-ed. But my friends are aiming too low — specifically, at Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security (as applied to him, an Orwellian title if ever there was one).
Mayorkas may be the architect of a policy that stands federal immigration law on its head, transmogrifying it from a statutory presumption that illegal aliens must be detained in order to discourage more unlawful immigration into an administration policy that illegal aliens must be invited to enter our country at liberty, then live and work here indefinitely while they press their claims for asylum, no matter how baseless. Nevertheless, this is not Mayorkas’s policy; it is Biden’s policy. The Framers’ objective in vesting all executive power in a single constitutional officer, the president, was to ensure that the elected president be held accountable — i.e., to make certain that the president, not the unelected minions who carry out his commands, would be answerable for critical policy decisions.
To repeat, yes, we know, there are not sufficient votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate — i.e., the required two-thirds’ supermajority — to remove Biden from office. But neither are there enough votes to remove Mayorkas, who is facing impeachment anyway. Nor for that matter, are there enough votes to remove Vice President Kamala Harris, whose portfolio ostensibly gives her control over border policy. But there were not enough votes for the removal of then-president Trump over the Ukraine kerfuffle in 2019, either — and that didn’t stop House Democrats from doing what they claimed was their duty, nor all Senate Democrats and one Republican from voting to convict him.
The Senate votes are not what matter right now. Biden does not want to bear the historic stigma of House impeachment articles, especially as he gears up to seek reelection. Moreover, an impeachment over the border catastrophe would not remotely resemble the aforementioned impeachment of Trump a year before the 2020 election. The Ukraine episode was a trifle, the impeachment was driven by nothing more than partisanship, and the whole exercise was so flippant that it was barely mentioned in the ensuing presidential campaign — even at the Democratic convention. In stark contrast, the destruction of the southern border is an existential national crisis that is already inflicting harm on millions of Americans.
That is the last thing to which Biden and Democrats want attention called. Border security is an 80–20 issue, favoring not so much Republicans (who are far from uniformly solid on upholding immigration law) as individual candidates and officials who demonstrate seriousness about it, most of whom happen to be Republicans. That’s why even Adams and his Windy City counterpart, the deeply unpopular Lori Lightfoot, have found religion on it of late.
Impeachment would grip the nation’s attention. House impeachment proceedings would rivet Americans nationwide to the shocking scenes at the border, to the disaster Biden’s policies have wrought for affected communities, and to an administration and its radical cheerleaders that urge still more millions of illegal aliens to invade, lawlessly “paroling” them into the country, secretly flying and bussing them in the dead of night to loose them on communities unprepared for the burdens — even as Democrats complain about red-state governors who transport aliens to the Democratic havens that exhorted the law-breakers to come . . . and now find themselves deluged.
Under Senate rules, if the House impeaches the president, the Senate must put all other government business aside and conduct an impeachment trial. So a trial would be the only game in town, guaranteeing weeks of coverage of Biden’s self-created border crisis. The destructiveness of administration policy, the president’s malevolent refusal to execute the laws faithfully, and congressional Democrats’ futile efforts to rationalize the sabotage would be on display for all to see.
You say the Senate would never convict Biden? I say: Who cares? The impeachment trial would frame the 2024 election, leaving voters to deal with Biden and Democrats.
The Framers believed impeachment was indispensable to the proper functioning of our government, because the credible threat of impeachment would induce presidents to honor their oaths — to enforce the laws, to safeguard the homeland from alien threats, and to elevate American interests over foreign interests. Joe Biden is not honoring his oath, and with Congress in a stalemate and state sovereignty nullified, only he can solve the border crisis he’s created. It’s that simple: Either Republicans use the only tool available to them to force Biden’s hand, or they are aiders and abettors. There is no middle ground.