Democrats’ Handling of the Border Crisis Is a Debacle That Ranks With President Biden’s Flight From Afghanistan

by Conrad Black

The handling by the Democrats and the anti-Trump Republican senators of the proposed reform of migration across the southern border, which is linked to assistance for Israel and Ukraine, ranks as a debacle equivalent in its incompetence to the shameful flight from Afghanistan. It is worse because of the complicity in a bait-and-switch operation of the Republican Senate leadership.

The apparent plan was that the bipartisan Senate leadership, with the blessing of the White House, would propose that when illegal migration (which they have no ability to calculate precisely), surpassed 5,000 in a day, the southern border would be temporarily closed. The minority leader, Senator McConnell, and his acolytes urged preemptive assent from House Republicans, without seeing the bill or having it described in detail.

The House GOP naturally balked, and Mr. McConnell and his dwindling entourage blamed the failure to make a splendid compromise on President Trump. He adheres to the official Republican position that the border should be closed to illegal migrants and that large numbers of those who have entered the country illegally in the past decade, and particularly the last three years, should be deported.

Under the proposed compromise, if precisely 5,000 illegals entered every day, the count would add up to 1.825 million persons a year. Obviously, this is just national suicide at a slightly more stately pace than the headlong charge to national chaos that the Biden administration has deliberately instituted and maintained. That any Republican senators would support such a measure is shocking.

The fact that the minority leader is supporting it is the final proof that it is time to disembark him from the position. The whole premise of this bill was nonsense. President Biden has the authority by executive order to complete the wall, end the catch-and-release policy, and restore the detention of undocumented immigrants in Mexico.

Mr. Biden, instead of exercising his executive authority and then undoing a little of the damage that he has deliberately inflicted on the country in the last three years, went through a charade in asserting that this compromise would be a first step to reduce illegal immigration, in the certain knowledge that none of this had any chance of success in the House of Representatives.

The proponents of this insane measure instead blamed its failure in advance on the former president, who is more than happy to take credit for its rejection. This whole subject is already one of the most disgraceful failures of government in American history; the Democrats want to recruit the newly arrived illegal migrants as grateful voters (despite their not being citizens, which is also illegal), and largely Republican employers want to exploit the cheap labor.

The Democrats betray their constituency in organized labor and both parties are complicit in systematic law-breaking on a huge scale. With this mass of illegal entrants, there also come extremely dangerous quantities of fentanyl that kill approximately 200 Americans every day, and the total is rising swiftly.

The American government effectively locks arms with the wealthiest and most savage criminal organizations in the world in the Mexican gangs. Every aspect of these arrangements is shameful, and potentially mortally dangerous to the country. This is not immigration: the arrival of large numbers of people eagerly desiring to become law-abiding American citizens and fully participating members in American society.

It much more closely resembles, but is even more sinister than, the huge numbers of barbarians that flooded across the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire in the fifth century and sixth century. That Mr. McConnell would be a party to such an appalling measure, and the author of the pathetic pretense that it was both a viable solution, and that it was being capriciously obstructed by the leader of his own party, is a singularly contemptible act.

Mr. McConnell promised in 2016 to drop Mr. Trump “like a hot rock.” In 2017, he and the Speaker  at the time, Paul Ryan, double-crossed Mr. Trump on the repeal of Obamacare, which they had purportedly attempted often in the Obama administration, when they knew that they had no chance of success, but which they failed deliberately to accomplish under the Trump presidency when repeal and replacement with a better system, as had been promised and was possible, was deliberately avoided.

The pigheaded conduct of the Never Trump Republicans has severely complicated the achievement of many of Mr. Trump’s reforms. The association by Mr. McConnell and others with acts of treachery against the former president will require Donald Trump, if he is reelected, to take drastic measures either to bring the Never Trumpers into a reasonable state of cooperation, or expel them from the Republican Party.

At least Mitch McConnell was for many years a stylish Senate maneuverer, whose principal talent and positive contribution has been in the elevation of competent Supreme Court justices, as well as his deliverance of the United States from the nightmare of having  Merrick Garland on the high court, though he should have allowed it to come to a vote and defeated it, as President Obama was entitled to a vote on his nominee.

Under any scenario, the country will have to wait for the election before dealing seriously with immigration. Fortunately, Israel is absolutely united and justly determined to eliminate the Hamas terrorist capability, and it is clear that the Arab powers are content with that, and we’ll see whether Iran and its other terrorist minions are unwilling to provoke Israel to a full state of war.

If Mr. Biden goes any further trying to lever assistance to Israel for a mitigated Israeli war effort in Gaza, Israel has the ability to ignore such pressures and do what is necessary to win the war that was so barbarously forced upon it and Mr. Biden would sink further in the polls. Ukraine is becoming a more serious problem, and the administration is in some danger of another horrible shambles of its own making, a foreign policy disaster greater even than Afghanistan.

Having been blasé about a Russian invasion at the outset, and convinced by the most inept chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the history of that office, General Mark Milley, that Russia would occupy all of Ukraine within a month, Mr. Biden then effectively announced that he would assist Ukraine in fighting to the death to expel Russia completely.

There was a lot of prattling about the Russian ruble being reduced to “rubble” and the need for regime change at the Kremlin. Despite the heroic efforts of the Ukrainians, they seem unable to make further progress to dislodge the Russians. Six months ago and earlier, President Putin would have been prepared to settle for what he had already occupied and acknowledged the legitimate sovereignty of Ukraine in these adjusted borders.

Yet Mr. Putin’s position has grown relatively stronger, and to force him to accept those terms now the West would have to increase sharply the quantity and quality of the aircraft and sophisticated weaponry they will need to supply Ukraine to achieve that peace. If Russia gains what it is now claiming — the entire Black Sea coast of Ukraine, and the demilitarization of that country, leaving it truncated and emasculated — Mr. Biden would have allowed Mr. Putin to have snatched a partial victory as the reward of his barbarous conduct and exposed the Western alliance as unreliable.

This would be an unjust, and still avoidable, result. We must remember that it was President Obama who warned of “Joe Biden’s ability to f— things up.” This was, perhaps, Mr. Obama’s most perceptive aperçu, and failure to heed it rests heavily upon us now.

First published in the New York Sun.