How Romney and the Anti-Trump GOP Fueled the Border Crisis

POS

American Greatness:

The poseurs on the so-called Right have contributed more to the current immigration crisis than anyone on the Left, and for that, they should forever be banished from any position of power in the Republican Party. 

After years of making empty promises and false threats about how to solve the country’s worsening illegal immigration problem, Romney and his NeverTrump accomplices sided with the Left (again) to undermine President Trump’s efforts to ease a crisis they just a few months ago denied existed. 

Subsequently, they jeopardized our national security; overwhelmed federal resources; subverted the president’s constitutional powers; abdicated Congress’ own constitutional duty; misled the American people; and fueled a chaotic situation that endangers the lives of everyone involved, including migrants and the people responsible for securing the border. 

Romney, a well-known flip-flopper, ran as an immigration hawk in 2012. He was for a border wall before he was against it. When he posed as the “severely conservative” 

Republican candidate for president, Romney supported a vague deportation plan for 11 million illegals, the hiring of more border agents and imposing obstacles for illegals to access education and employment opportunities. 

He blasted President Obama’s failed policies. “We will stop the flow of illegal immigration into this country, I’m convinced of that,” he assured us in January 2012. 

Exactly seven years later, in his consolation-prize role as Utah’s junior senator, Romney voted with Democrats against stopping the flow of illegals, and instead opted to block progress on a border wall he once insisted we needed.  

In March, Romney joined 11 other Republican senators to halt Trump’s emergency declaration about the U.S.-Mexican border. Calling it only an “humanitarian crisis,” Romney blathered about constitutional boundaries and the rule of law as his excuse for thwarting Trump’s perfectly legal exercise of executive power. Romney was joined in his weasel move by Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Pat Toomey (R-Penn.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). 

Many defended their vote as a choice to forego a bogus “constitutional” crisis over solving a legitimate border crisis. These open-borders Republicans were egged on by the same conservative commentariat that has offered little in the way of legitimate solutions to the immigration crisis. 

The editorial board of National Review encouraged Senate Republicans to overturn Trump’s declaration, of course, on grounds of “principle.” 

The defectors would show a willingness “to stand up for how our constitutional system is supposed to work—even when the underlying political objective is a worthy one, even when it means crossing a president of their own party, even when it is politically inconvenient,” the editors wrote on March 13. 

Never mind that they fail to understand the nature of executive power or the political power of the people who elected him to exercise it. 

Apparently National Review’s editors want to play by long-abandoned rules of a Democrat-created administrative state and believe that, in doing so, they can win favor and prestige with other weak political actors and donors as the Left steamrolls the Right and laughs at our obsequiousness. 

David French (naturally) hammered the president for months on the issue, arguing in January there was no national emergency on the southern border and that Trump’s threat to invoke the National Emergencies Act represented an abuse of power.