Friday’s telecast of “The View”, featured Senator and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as a guest.
Alyssa Farah Griffin mentioned President Biden spoke about the border during his State Of The Union address, and asked Schumer this question:
“Well, Senator, Biden was right last night to bring up the strong bipartisan border bill that Trump essentially killed that Sen. Lankford (R-OK) had worked on. But do you think that Democrats need to acknowledge that the immigration crisis we’re now in, which is a top issue for voters, is a result of a number of Trump-era policies that President Biden decided to reverse?”
And here was Schumer’s answer – in rust, with my reactions in blue:
“No, I don’t think so. (Stop right here. Under Trump we averaged less than 500,000 border encounters a year, and when they spiked upward in 2019 Trump coerced Mexico into a “hold them there” policy that lowered us back to only a little over 400,000 in 2020. In Joe Biden’s first year – after undoing all the border policies put in place by Trump – we had almost 2,000,000 encounters – with 2022 at about 2,700,000 and 2023 at over 3,000,000. Biden’s average per year is over 5 times what Trump’s was. That makes everything Schumer says from now on ridiculous).
I think the contrast was amazing. President Biden has a real plan on immigration. I know, because we worked on it with the Senate. We put a bipartisan group, Sen. Lankford, Sen. Murphy (D-CT), Sen. Sinema (I-AZ), and they put together a really tough immigration proposal that could pass in a bipartisan way. The plan was so tough that it was supported by The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the fount of hard-right conservatism in America. It was supported by the Border Patrol union. They’ve been right-wing and pro-Trump. It was supported by the Chambers of Commerce because it was tough and strong. It stopped fentanyl — if we enacted it — from coming over our borders by using these fentanyl detection machines, it increased the number of people who would apprehend people crossing the border, and it even had a cap on any immigration if too many people came across the border. So, it was tough and strong. A lot of Republicans liked it at the beginning. When they were shown it, they said, I’m amazed, the Democrats are really moving in a tough, strong direction on [the] border. And then, Donald Trump, their leader, said, I don’t want them to do anything on the border, I want it to stay a crisis for a whole year so I can win the election.” (A complete lie. First of all, what Biden proposed is 100% unrelated to the three years he did nothing as millions came in. Secondly, the “support” is only because, as flawed as this bill is, it is better than the nothingburger Biden gave them for three years. I’ve heard too many border patrol people make this point to pretend otherwise. I’ll ignore the other BS parts of Schumer’s response and try to just stick with the most grating ones).
He continued, “Can you imagine the nerve, the chutzpah of this guy? Here they say, the border’s an emergency, we better fix it. Here we have a plan that fixes it in a bipartisan way (It doesn’t “fix” anything. It lowers the number of illegals allowed through our border to a number that, if we had not seen the tidal wave Biden allowed in already, would be a major outrage. Like taking a 1.4% inflation rate, zooming it up to 9.1%, and then when it drops back to 3.2% – more than double where it was with Trump – saying “look, we lowered inflation. Schumer assumes we are idiots; ignoramuses who don’t see what is in front of our eyes. And, sad to say, for a good many people he has a point. I hope you’re not one of them.
Schumer went on, but I think – at least hope – you get the idea.
However, this was “The View”. So his comments, despite being ridiculous/fraudulent, were joyously received by the show’s panel, and their amen-chorus audience.
Time will tell how many others are this benighted.
