Republicans' border battle at risk of blowing up
Generally, it's always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach — and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it's the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it's clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all.
After years of insisting that Congress must act to "protect the border" and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it's all up to the president. (They say this, by the way, even as they whine incessantly over Biden's attempts to relieve Americans of their crushing burden of student loan debt, claiming that he's behaving like a tyrant.)
All of this is nothing but another right-wing kabuki dance, staged by the Republican Party whenever they come close to getting what they've asked for. For them, this is all a game in which they believe they can strongarm Democrats into total capitulation. They put on quite a show but it never works.
In the past they tended to play this hand around economic issues, rending their garments over the deficit, demanding that Democrats slash domestic spending to the bone or they will refuse to raise the debt ceiling or fund the government. In fact, they have done just that in the past year which resulted in the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by the right-wing when he negotiated a deal with the Democratic Senate and the White House to raise the debt ceiling and avoid economic catastrophe. This wasn't the first time they did this and it also resulted in the resignation of an earlier GOP speaker. This tactic doesn't hurt the Democrats, it hurts their own leaders.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-border-battle-risk-blowing-142021671.html
