OPINION:
Perhaps the biggest upside of the Democratic National Convention’s inability to operate on schedule was that former President Barack Obama didn’t get a chance to address the confab until late in the evening.
By the time his stemwinder was over, it was close to midnight, and most Americans had likely tuned out. This spared them from hearing the graceless attacks on his successor, former President Donald Trump.
The 44th president’s verbal barrage dutifully tracked the convention’s messaging points, repeating the fiction that Mr. Trump “killed a bipartisan immigration deal written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress that would’ve helped secure our southern border, because he thought trying to actually solve the problem would hurt his campaign.”
Democrats are desperate to address the electoral weakness created by their policy of leaving America’s border undefended. The Biden-Harris administration’s open-borders agenda has invited an estimated 10 million or more immigrants to enter the country illegally over the past 3½ years.
It’s probably true that, politically speaking, passage of the bipartisan border bill would have hurt Mr. Trump and downballot Republicans. But that’s only because the bill was designed from the start to provide cover for open-border Democrats on a critical issue in which voters — by a wide margin — trust the GOP more than Democrats, according to the polls.
What Mr. Obama calls a compromise was a sham from the start. It was never expected to make its way into law, and it was never bipartisan in any meaningful sense. The first vote failed 50-49, despite the Democratic majority in the upper chamber.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, had tasked Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, with negotiating the deal with Senate Democrats. To say that Mr. Lankford allowed himself to get rolled is an understatement.
To make the scheme more palatable to certain lawmakers, the border bill and its $20 billion in spending were wrapped into a $118 billion package that lavished taxpayer cash on Ukraine and tossed a few billion toward Israel and Taiwan. The package would have also handed billions to the nongovernmental organizations responsible for bringing foreign nationals to our border, making the situation worse.
“Here’s what the people pushing this ‘deal’ aren’t telling you,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, said once he had the text of the bill in hand. “It accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day and gives automatic work permits to asylum recipients — a magnet for more illegal immigration.”
Senate Republicans filibustered the measure every time it came to the floor, ensuring it never made its way to the House, where the GOP majority wouldn’t have approved it anyway. It’s an outcome that doesn’t speak well for either Mr. McConnell’s legacy as a master political strategist or Mr. Lankford’s negotiating skills.
In selling this revisionist history, Mr. Obama’s late-night speech included this unintentionally humorous bit: “We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.”
He was referring to Mr. Trump’s presidency, naturally, but it is a more apt description of the past 3½ years of the Biden-Harris administration. It’s also exactly what we might expect from a President Kamala Harris if given the opportunity to continue driving her party’s open-border agenda for four more years.
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