Posted on 11/10/2021 3:02:10 AM PST by Kaslin
In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump's highest-profile promise was to build the wall -- that is, to construct a barrier along about 1,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Once elected, Trump's best chance to win money from Congress for a wall came in 2018, when Republican Speaker Paul Ryan controlled the House and Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell controlled the Senate.
It didn't happen. Now, one of Trump's strongest supporters on Capitol Hill, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, is out with a new memoir, "Do What You Said You Would Do," on Nov. 23 that describes those months when GOP lawmakers fought over competing visions of immigration reform. The battle was intense, it was passionate and it came to nothing. No stricter immigration laws were passed, and there was no significant funding for a wall. For that failure, Jordan points the finger of blame straight at then-Speaker Ryan.
"Paul Ryan is not where the American people are," Jordan writes. "Paul Ryan's position on immigration is the same as the positions of the National Chamber of Commerce." In the world of conservative immigration policy activists, accusing someone of siding with the Chamber of Commerce is about as harsh as it gets.
As Jordan tells it, Ryan sabotaged Republican immigration reform by refusing to support a bill that the large majority of Republicans supported, instead pushing a weaker bill that the Chamber supported. The result was that, facing united Democratic opposition, neither Republican bill passed.
The bill promoted by Jordan and his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus would have "ended family-based chain migration apart from spouses and children," Jordan writes. "It contained mandatory E-Verify language for employers and eliminated the visa lottery ... [it] also defunded sanctuary cities and appropriated $30 billion for construction of the wall." The bill, Jordan argues, "was consistent with the message of the 2016 election."
The bill supported by Ryan would also have funded the wall, albeit with $25 billion. "But it did nothing else to address the problems we were elected to solve," Jordan writes. "It had no language to address chain migration, E-Verify or sanctuary cities ... [It] also created a renewable six-year legal status for up to 2.4 million illegal immigrants and gave those individuals a path to legal citizenship." Finally, while the bill ended the visa lottery, it "reallocated those visas to amnesty recipients."
"Which bill do you think Speaker Ryan supported?" Jordan asks. "You already know the answer."
Ryan, Jordan charges, did not want to allow the House to vote on the Freedom Caucus bill. He did so only after the group threatened to sink a big, must-pass farm bill if they didn't get a vote on immigration. And then, the speaker declined to put pressure on -- or whip, as they say on Capitol Hill -- any Republicans to vote for it. And still, the conservative bill got 193 votes -- a solid majority of the 241 Republicans in the House at that time. Ryan did push for the other bill -- what Jordan calls the Chamber of Commerce bill -- but in the end it got only 121 votes.
"Why push for a bill that was 100 votes short of passing instead of a bill that got 193 votes and therefore was just a few votes shy of passing?" Jordan asks. "You already know why. Paul Ryan doesn't want the legislation President Trump and the American people supported."
The Jordan-Ryan clash was a classic Republican immigration debate. While Democrats are virtually unanimous in support of amnesty and more liberal immigration laws, the GOP is divided between a conservative faction, which favors more restrictive measures, and a business-oriented faction, which favors less restrictive measures and higher levels of immigration. Trump's border wall proposal ran straight into that preexisting conflict.
In the end, Trump found other ways to build some of the wall. By the time he left office and resident Biden stopped construction, about 450 miles had been built, most of it replacing existing but dilapidated older barriers. The Republican Congress' failure to fund a wall has had real-life consequences, most recently in the crisis in Del Rio, Texas, when 15,000 illegal border crossers waded across the Rio Grande and created a squalid migrant camp just inside the United States. The Biden administration allowed thousands of them to stay.
It was a crisis that is sure to be repeated, probably in the near future. But the story might have been different had Republicans not been so divided in that 2018 debate.
With apologies to Walt Kelly, we have met the enemy and he is the US Chamber of Commerce.
Ryan aborted ALL Repubbie efforts to change, amend, or replace ObamaCare as well. He did represent his GROPElite Swamp backers in Washington though. Probably to get the 2020, (now 2024) nomination by preventing Trumps re-election in 2030.
But that failed. Trump is still viable with powerful endorsements. Ryan is still only a mistake on Romney’s toilet paper.
Ryan the Crow utilized his position to sabotage the nation’s future, fulfilling his particular mission for that moment in time. Now he is over at Fox, working behind the scene to accomplish the same goal.
RYAN is an EVIL DEMOCRAT POSING as a RINO!
My Republican rep Thomas Massie, darling of conservative republicans, fought as hard as any no borders democrat to subvert Trump’s pentagon workaround of the obstruction. This putz claimed constitutional grounds but said zip about the constitutionality of a stolen presidential election. It’s 99% of the pubbies once they get to DC.
Remember AOC and her weeping at the "cage" scene...which I believe turned out to be a parking lot.
Much like Malliotakis.
We all here could see the betrayal. Trump was still in the throes of fighting off various enemies and perhaps trusted Ryan.
Ryan also did nothing to keep House Republicans to seek another term, instead there was a mass exodus of incumbents.
I truly believe had they passed legislation and fewer House Members had run for reelection we would have kept the house.
Worse than that, he is a TRAITOR.
“Once elected, Trump’s best chance to win money from Congress for a wall came in 2018”
Unlike the NeverTrumpers here, I don’t go around looking for ways to attack Trump, with the smug thought that maybe DeSantis or Noem would, instead, be treated ‘nicely’ by the media if they were the Republican nominee.
But for the above...Trump’s best chance was in his first 100 days in office. Waiting until 2018 was a huge mistake, as it allowed Ryan and the other traitors to simply run out the clock.
For the first three years of his Administration, Trump's leadership staff at the Department of Homeland Security were 100% RINOs, Democrats, or Barack Obama holdover executives.
During Trump's first three years - before COVID - Trump naturalized more new citizens and issued more new Green Cards than Obama did during Obama's last three years in office.
Trump's FIRST illegal workplace raid took place just six months before the 2018 mid-term election, H-1B foreign labor was never reduced, and OPT foreign STEM graduates with 36 month contracts increased by more than 100,000 workers.
Every time a federal court shot down one of Trump's headline immigration executive orders, Trump would send in a legal team of Deep State Lifers to fecklessly postpone any consequential decisions for years.
If Trump had won reelection in 2020, he would have repeated George W. Bush's political stunt from 2005 - an immediate massive amnesty in exchange for immigration reforms that would never be enforced or funded.
Trump's most important accomplishment as President was to postpone America's political and economic suicide for four years.
For that, I am sincerely grateful.
The money flowing into the Democrat party is ruthlessly focused and ruthlessly enforced. The billionaires, beginning with George Soros and extending into the billionaires who own social media, will tolerate no defections. If defections occur, executions follow until morale improves.
So the Democrats have a fixed ideology focused and reinforced by ruthless financial discipline.
The Republicans have neither discipline nor inspiring ideology. Perhaps there is a key here?
I never like Paul Ryan. So glad he’s gone. Not gone really, he’s lobbying something somewhere that goes against Americans.
You are correct and no one can deny it. Walls did go up and the rats tried to stop him at every turn. Obviously the author did not pay any attention.
All three of these props of Democrat hopes in 2022 are big lies or, at best, big exaggerations.
The point is the Democrats can hold hundreds of nationally elected congresspeople in control to advance lies without significant defections. In other words, Democrat discipline is so complete that egregious lies are accepted and even advanced by party soldiers. Witness the southern border where " there is no crisis."
The Democrats can lie with confidence. Knowing that they will not be exposed by the media, apart from conservative media which is daily discredited. Indeed, Democrats know that their lies will not even be covered much less debated in their media.
Similarly, they know the other side of the coin also holds: any defection by a Democrat from lies agreed upon will result in media attacks and financial ruin. Republicans can confidently assume the opposite: agreement with Democrat lies will result in media accolades and plenty of financial support from the Chamber of Commerce and K St.
We are asking our Republican politicians to find a hill to die on but they have long since looked for a place to dine out.
Good stuff from Jordan. It’s way past time for Jordan and the other “good” Republicans to start telling tales out of school. The GOP has betrayed its voters for decades to the benefit of the Democrat Marxist agenda. This must end if they want MAGA votes.
Not only did the GOP deliver the Biden Marxist infrastructure bill they have also have teed up the Green New Deal to pass under the reconciliation process. The Dems can now pass that at their leisure thanks to McConnell and the Quisling GOP Senate.
Ryan worked with the Dems to encourage that Trump didn’t get any of his election promises done. He encouraged GOP’s to resign, not run, retire to ensure Dems got a majority.
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