Sen. Rand Paul is desperate for a reason to justify his opposition to the immigration reform bill, but the one he came up with was completely idiotic.
Video:
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Transcript via CNN:
CROWLEY: So, you’re a no despite the fact they are pouring $30 billion worth of border patrol — they are doubling the size of the border where we’re told that illegal entry is way down. They’re going to have 24/7 drone coverage of the border. Does that not tell you the border is going to be secure?
PAUL: It may, but we’ve thrown a lot of money at a lot of problems in our country. To me, what really tells me that they’re serious would be letting Congress vote on whether the border’s secure. If the people in the country want to be assured that we will not get another 10 million people to come here illegally over the next decade, they have to believe they get a vote through their Congress. If this is a done deal once the bill’s over and it’s a done deal, we never get to revisit it because it will be very difficult, I don’t think we’ll really get a truly secure border. The other part of a secure border is you have to have a functioning work visa program. This bill puts new caps and allows less workers to come in to pick crops. That’s where the illegal immigration is coming from. This bill will actually make that problem worse.
CROWLEY: Senator, part of the problem, of course, that people say of having Congress be able to say, yes, it’s secure. Go ahead and let’s start legalizing some of the folks that are here, is that Congress is a pretty political place, and if you leave something that you think is a matter of numbers up to Capitol Hill, they will make it about politics. So if you put it in the hands of, say, homeland security —
PAUL: And you think the president — you think the president’s not political? Recently he released 1.3 —
CROWLEY: Well, he’s the president.
PAUL: Well recently this president released $1.3 billion to Egypt because he says they’re obeying democracy. That was a week after they indicted 16 Americans for doing democracy work over there. So I don’t trust this administration or a Republican administration to really make a valid judgment. I want Congress and the people to have the right to decide whether the border is secure. Is that political? Yes, we live in a democracy, a Democratic republic. It will be political no matter whether it’s the president or congress.
This is all part of Rand Paul’s attempt to recover after he was savaged by his own party for initially supporting immigration reform. Sen. Paul just happened to list one of stupidest things imaginable as one of his criteria for supporting immigration reform. Paul’s suggestion that congress should get to vote on if the borders are secure was stunningly dumb.
As Candy Crowley pointed out, the vote would have no basis in reality because congress would make it political. More importantly, congress can vote to say that anything is true, but that doesn’t make it so. Congress could vote tomorrow that the sky is orange, but it wouldn’t really mean that the sky is orange, just that congress thinks it is.
The other problem with wanting congress to vote on whether or not the border is secure is that people don’t trust congress. In case Sen. Paul hasn’t noticed, 90% of the country doesn’t trust congress. The last people in the universe that the American people are likely trust on anything reside in the congress.
Paul may trust congress more than the president, but the American people don’t.
Rand Paul is absolutely desperate to suck up to the right after supporting immigration reform, but the load of idiotic bull that he tried to pass off as a reason for opposing immigration reform was nothing short of a shameful joke.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
