James Lankford Stunned GOP Doesn't Actually Want Immigration Fixed HA HA HA Oh Mercy
Our sides, they ache from the laughter.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma continues to sincerely believe that Republicans want legislation to address the Kafka-esque nightmare that is American immigration policy, particularly with regards to migrants trying to cross the southern border.
Meanwhile, yr Wonkette continues to find Lankford’s apparently sincere beliefs just adorable.
Here was Lankford on Monday morning’s “Fox & Friends,” telling Brian Kilmeade in small words he presumably hoped Fox’s audience might understand about the immigration bill he has negotiated to address the problem, as if he is some kind of legislator sent to Washington, DC, to do just that, and what is it with you people, anyway:
The key aspect of this, again, is are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the border’s bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December? Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things? Are we going to actually address in a change as many things as we can if we have the shot?
Ha ha ha, now that’s comedy! Of course the Republicans don’t want to actually solve this problem! They want to be able to spend the rest of the year blaming Democrats for it in the hopes it will help them win elections in November! They have said this out loud! More than once!
It doesn’t help that the bill also includes $60 billion in aid for Ukraine to help that country fend off an actual invasion, which the nativists of the GOP — or, as we call them, the GOP — also staunchly oppose helping the Ukrainians with.
Apparently Lankford has spent his decade as a senator working in some other parallel universe where America has a functional Congress and the Republican Party is not being run by insane people. Because this is the exact same play Republicans have been running at least since Mullah Obama took his hand off the Koran at his first inauguration: scream about a problem until they suck all the oxygen out of the air, let Democrats and naïve morons in the GOP think they have negotiated a good compromise, then suddenly chuck said compromise into the Potomac because they didn’t get 110 percent of what they wanted.
Shoot, this is not even the first time they have run this play specifically on a bill to address immigration.
And this bill is reportedly very conservative, giving the GOP a lot of the policy wins it has been advocating for. More liberal immigration reformers on the Democratic side were likely going to be very upset.
Nonetheless, the bill has already been declared dead in the House of Representatives by Speaker Mike Johnson, who Lankford was specifically responding to. Johnson had called the bill “worse than expected,” presumably because it doesn’t include stationing snipers at 50-yard intervals along the entire border and shooting anyone trying to come across from Mexico. So far as we know, anyway.
(Any woman caught fleeing to Mexico to take advantage of its decriminalized abortion care presumably would also be shot, the whores, because Republicans also feel as strongly about keeping working American uteruses in the country as they feel about keeping working migrant uteruses out.)
Johnson was also upset because “the lead Democrat negotiator” (we’re assuming he meant Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who negotiated the bill with Lankford and Senator-for-now Kyrsten Sinema) said that under the agreement, “the border never closes.” Literally closing the border until it leaks less than all the Republicans’ Depends is an unrealistic and unreachable goal, but it is also one of those shibboleths conservatives will use as an excuse to accuse the James Lankfords of the world of selling out America or some such, even if the bill has the words “close the border” in every paragraph.
Just to underscore the point, on Monday morning Johnson put out another press release signed by the entire brain trust that is House GOP leadership to announce that the bill is extra-super-duper dead, and demanding the Senate GOP reject it.
Now to be fair to Lankford for some reason, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been on board with this negotiation, so it’s not as if he went rogue in working on it. But McConnell has his own nutters in his caucus to deal with, such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, whose aide reportedly stormed out of a meeting on Monday morning screaming about Lankford’s “betrayal.” (This allegedly caused everyone else in the room to burst out laughing.)
Yr Wonkette makes no predictions about where everything goes from this unbridgeable impasse, except for one: it will get stupider. Of course, we say that for everything, but we have yet to be disappointed.
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Tweet from LTC (Ret) Alexander Vindman:
"Motherfucking traitors. SteveScalise@HouseGOP will own this. Every one of these anti-American politicians will be defeated sooner than later."
Rule out the idea that any of these Republican "no" votes are nativists who oppose helping a foreign country defend itself, or anti-immigration stalwarts who simply want a much harsher immigration law. This is all about one thing only--Donald Fucking Trump told these weak-ass cucks to block all of this, because he loves slurping up Putin's leavings, and he wants immigration to remain a "crisis" for the election. That's it, there's nothing else to it, and these dumb fucks already said they oppose the bill before it even was released, and admitted that this was on Trump's orders.
Read them for filth, over and again, and put the wavering Republicans--the ones who have to get some moderate votes to be re-elected, and the ones who really believed their party wanted border security and didn't realize it was all bad faith bullshit--on the spot.