Republican Skulduggery (part gazillion)

Click here for a particularly good article by Heather Cox Richardson, from her newsletter Letters From an American, on Substack, for January 30, 2024.

House speaker Mike Johnson has told his Republican colleagues that he will not bring forward the bipartisan immigration bill senators have been working on for months, calling it “absolutely dead.” 

Although Johnson insisted in November that border security was so crucial that he wouldn’t bring up aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza until such legislation was attached to it, Trump has made it clear he wants immigration and border security left on the table for him to use as an issue in his run for the presidency.

So, now that border security is apparently no longer of any urgency, House Republicans are moving to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Rather than passing the laws the country needs, the extremist Republicans appear to be determined to tee up an issue on which Trump can run for president in 2024. House speaker Johnson has demanded “ZERO” illegal crossings into the U.S., but this is a standard that no previous homeland security secretary has met because it is impossible to wall off every single means of entering this country by water, air, or land. And—despite Republicans’ false claims that Biden has established “open borders”—immigrants were more likely to be released into the country during Trump's term than during Biden’s. 

What is going on here is an attempt of the extremist Republicans to undercut the administration by attacking a key cabinet officer not for actual misbehavior but on policy grounds. 

Johnson's rejection of the immigration bill now threatens aid to Ukraine: 

Ukraine is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, but the struggle there is larger than one between two countries: it is the question of whether the rules-based international order put in place after World War II will survive, or whether the world will go back to a system in which stronger countries can gobble up less powerful ones.

This Republican chicanery should be obvious to all -- but of course, it isn't. The MAGA mob and uninformed voters won't know all this is going on and will believe the lies their Republican leaders are telling them.