A querulous quartet of conservatives took to
the Senate floor Wednesday to condemn President Obama for his latest
atrocity against the American way of life.
The Republican foursome, assembled to criticize the president for failing to visit the border
during his visit to Texas this week, was coordinated by Sen. John
McCain and included fellow Arizonan Jeff Flake and both of the chamber’s
Texans, Sen. John Cornyn and the man McCain once dubbed a “wacko bird,”
Sen. Ted Cruz.
“President Obama today is down in the state of
Texas, but sadly he’s not visiting the border,” said Cruz, in a rare
collaboration with McCain. “. . . He’s visiting Democratic
fat cats to collect checks, and apparently there’s no time to look at
the disaster, at the devastation that’s being caused by his policies. . . . It is a disaster that is the direct consequence of President Obama’s lawlessness.”
It is surely no coincidence that Cruz’s words
on the Senate floor followed closely the logic of Sarah Palin, who this
week wrote on the Breitbart Web site that Obama’s “lawlessness” requires his impeachment.
“His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered
wife say, ‘no mas,’ ” Wasilla’s favorite daughter wrote. “. . . Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. This is his fundamental transformation of America.”
¡Ay, caramba! Palin deserves kudos for using
her entire Spanish vocabulary. But this border crisis, sowed years ago
and building for months, is neither a high crime nor a misdemeanor. It’s
a humanitarian nightmare in which children, some as young as 4, can
face physical and sexual abuse, injury and death in their lonely
journeys. What’s upside-down about the Cruz-Palin argument is that this
crisis has actually been brought about by Obama following the law.
President Barack Obama walks down the stairs from Air Force One at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport en route to Dallas, Texas, Wednesday, July 9, 2014. (LM Otero/AP)
The most obvious and direct cause of the flood
of children from Central America is the 2008 human trafficking law that
ended the rapid deportation of unaccompanied minors who come illegally
from countries other than Mexico and Canada. The law essentially
guarantees long stays for these immigrants by promising them a
deportation process that can take 18 months, during which time they are
often placed with family members who have little incentive to have the
kids show up for hearings.
The law, which cleared both houses of Congress
by unanimous consent and was signed by George W. Bush in his final days
in office, was bipartisan and well intentioned — but it was exploited
by the very traffickers it was meant to target, who encouraged this huge
emigration of children from Central America.
This makes it all the more inexplicable that
Obama is avoiding a visit to the border during his trip to Texas. His
absence makes it appear that he is hiding from the issue, giving his
critics a free shot. Even Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, worried
that this could be Obama’s “Katrina moment,” referring to George W.
Bush’s slow initial response to the 2005 hurricane.
During his appearance on the Senate floor
Wednesday, Cornyn noted that Obama, in Dallas, would be “500 miles from
where the problem is. How can you have a humanitarian crisis, as the
White House has called this, and not want to go see it for yourself?”
White House officials, after days of
maintaining that they weren’t concerned about the “optics” of Obama
skipping the border, added a last-minute Dallas event to Obama’s
schedule Wednesday addressing “the urgent humanitarian situation.”
Obama’s conservative critics say the crisis
was caused by his decision to suspend deportation of children who were
brought illegally to the United States before 2007. That probably
contributed to the problem. Central American parents may have been led
to believe Obama’s leniency toward the so-called “Dreamers” would also
benefit these current arrivals. The Obama administration’s alternative
explanation is that the children coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador are fleeing violence. That is surely another factor.
But even in the querulous quartet on the
Senate floor Wednesday there was an acknowledgment that the 2008
trafficking law is, as Flake put it, “the root of it or the main part of
it.” Cornyn agreed that “we need to change that 2008 law” because it
makes it so “these immigrants who come across will not be detained.”
Alas, there was no such honesty from Cruz, who
forecast 90,000 child immigrants coming illegally this year and 145,000
next year. “This explosion is the direct consequence of the president’s
lawlessness,” he repeated, adding, “The only response that will stop
this humanitarian disaster is for President Obama to start enforcing the
law.”
The truth — that this disaster has been caused
by Obama’s adherence to the law — would be hard for Cruz to square with
his worldview.
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive
No comments:
Post a Comment