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The bipartisan border bill failed in the U.S. Senate Thursday, even losing the support of two key negotiators who helped craft the legislation. This marked the second time the Senate voted against moving forward with the bill.
The vote on the border bill “is not an effort to actually make law, it is an effort to do political messaging,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said Thursday ahead of the vote. Lankford worked to negotiate the bill with Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., but he and Sinema voted against the bill Thursday, criticizing the reintroduction of the bill as being politically motivated.
Sen. Lankford helped to craft the border bill, but voted against it today.
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) May 23, 2024
"Everyone sees this for what it is. It is not an effort to actually make law, it is an effort to do political messaging." pic.twitter.com/0Ab0M2l2fe
The bill, which needed 60 votes to pass, failed with 50 senators voting against it and 43 voting in favor.
The vote broke largely along party lines with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska being the only Republican to vote for the bill. Six Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the bill.
WATCH: Border bill fails in the Senate a second time. pic.twitter.com/bM9PfY3UZl
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) May 23, 2024
During the first vote in February, Lankford voted in favor of advancing the border bill, along with Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah.
Analysts expected the latest vote on the bill to fail following Republicans’ outspoken criticism of the measure.
The bill “spends $20 billion to not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said during a news conference Wednesday.
Johnson and other GOP senators bashed the bill for allowing up to 5,000 illegal aliens to enter daily in a seven-day period.
The bill directs the Department of Homeland Security to close the southern border “during a period of seven consecutive calendar days, [if] there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day.”
Over 1.8 million illegal aliens a year still would be permitted to enter the United States under the now twice failed legislation.
Republicans bashed the bill as an election year stunt.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are promoting the bill because “poll numbers are showing [Democrats] that, after months and months of throwing the border open to anyone who wants to come in, that the public doesn’t like the policy.”
Gallup reports that immigration is the No. 1 issue not specifically related to the economy on the minds of American voters right now.
“And now, all of a sudden, six months before an election, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have got religion on border security,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio., said ahead of the vote.
Under the Biden administration, Customs and Border Protection has encountered over 9.5 million illegal aliens on America’s border and at ports of entry. With five months remaining in fiscal year 2024, CBP encounters of illegal immigrants under President Joe Biden’s leadership are expected to far surpass 10 million before the start of the new fiscal year.
An additional nearly 1.8 million illegal aliens have crossed the border managing to evade Border Patrol. Authorities refer to them as “known gotaways.” It is impossible to know how many unknown gotaways have entered the country in recent years.
Senate Republicans continue to advocate for the passage of the border security bill known as H.R. 2, which the House passed in May 2023. If passed into law, H.R. 2 would end “catch and release,” restart construction of the border wall, and reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, among other things.
“The Democrats don’t want border security,” Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a statement. “Every single Democrat in the Senate supports these open borders. And I can say that because every single time we push to implement real border security to stop this invasion—to stop Joe Biden from releasing criminal illegal aliens that are threatening our families—every single Democrat votes no.”
On Tuesday night, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and Cruz, spoke on the Senate floor and called for the Senate to pass H.R. 2 by unanimous consent. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., reserved the right to object and blocked the bill.
The post Border Bill Goes Down in Flames on Senate Floor appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are scheduled to debate on June 27, but the debate will be unlike those held between presidential candidates in the recent past.
Trump told Biden he would debate him “Anytime. Anywhere. Anyplace,” and Biden accepted, but with stipulations. The Biden campaign said it would only agree to a debate if there was no live audience, hearkening back to the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, which was telecast live from a TV studio without a studio audience.
Fox News reports that the Biden campaign also stipulated that the debate should be hosted by a “broadcast organization that hosted a Republican primary debate in 2016 in which Donald Trump participated, and a Democratic primary debate in 2020 in which President Biden participated—so neither campaign can assert that the sponsoring organization is obviously unacceptable: if both candidates have previously debated on their airwaves, then neither could object to such venue.”
Those stipulations limited the hosting networks to a handful of outlets, including CNN. The outlet’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will co-host the debate at CNN’s studios in Atlanta. The debate gives CNN the opportunity, amid low ratings, to appeal to Americans who have come to view CNN as little more than a mouthpiece for the Left.
During prime time in March, Deadline reports, CNN averaged 601,000 views, falling far behind MSNBC’s 1.31 million-viewer average during the same time of day, and Fox News’ 2.14 million. CNN’s prime-time viewership is up 5% for the first quarter of 2024, compared with the previous year.
With additional Biden campaign stipulations requiring that a “candidate’s microphone should only be active when it is his turn to speak,” viewers will be watching whether CNN adheres to this rule equally between both candidates.
Perhaps most importantly, CNN’s Tapper and Bash will be judged by the questions they do or don’t ask.
Apart from questions related to the economy, which are bound to be asked, given Republican and Democratic voters’ shared concerns over inflation, CNN should take the opportunity to show U.S. voters it will hold Biden’s feet to the fire on the president’s border and immigration policies and his handling of foreign policy, with regard to China, Russia, and Iran, and support for Israel.
If CNN fails to conduct a substantive debate between the two candidates, ABC News will have the opportunity to do so on Sept. 10, but CNN will have missed a golden opportunity to show Americans it can do more than pander to the Biden administration.
On this week’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we discuss what to expect during the upcoming presidential debates.
Also on today’s show: A Target store’s tough anti-shoplifting measures in California show how far blue cities have fallen. Plus, ahead of Memorial Day, we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. And as always, we’ll be crowning our “Problematic Woman of the Week.”
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Trump, Biden, and CNN: What to Know About the First Presidential Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The protests in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death in police custody and today’s antisemitic, pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are rooted in the same ideology of Marxism, Katharine Gorka says.
Marxism preaches that the world “is divided between oppressor and oppressed,” says Gorka, co-author with Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez of the new book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.” (Heritage launched The Daily Signal in 20014.)
German-born philosopher Karl Marx believed that the oppressors were the business owners and the oppressed were the workers. But Gorka says that Marxism today, or “NextGen Marxism,” holds that the “oppressors are white, Americans, Israelis, [but] some Asians … kind of the successful.”
“And the oppressed is everybody else, right?” she asks rhetorically. “Anybody who’s a minority of any sort, whether it’s based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, [or] having once been colonized.”
This movement of Marxism today has its roots in the 1960s, Gorka explains, as the student activists of those says became the community organizers who influence young people today, often via social media.
Gorka joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to outline the progression of Marxism and to discuss philanthropy’s significant role in furthering Marxist ideology in America.
Listen to the podcast below:
The post This Is the Next Generation of Marxism appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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