New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the weekend might as well have been headlined: “Instructions On Making Freudian Slips.”
After leftist freshmen Democrat Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City, Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis, Ayanna Pressley of Boston, and Rashiba Tlaib of Detroit bucked the leadership and voted against the Senate’s $4.6 billion humanitarian border financing bill, Pelosi said they’d rendered themselves “irrelevant.” Immediately, she was hit with ammo almost always reserved for Republicans.
Ocasio-Cortez retorted that Pelosi decided “to blindly trust the Trump admin when so many kids have died in their custody.” The comment is laced with a measure of subtlety, but can it be anything other than AOC accusing her own party’s House speaker of being complicit in killing kids?
A bigger slip came from Tlaib on ABC on Sunday. Referring to federal Customs and Border Protection agents, she remarked: “They signed up to protect the border, not to separate children, not to put people in cages.”
Nice that AOC’s fellow Democratic Socialists of America member Tlaib can admit on national TV that our border patrol agents are there to protect the border, but two weeks earlier she and the other three radical House freshmen issued a press release calling those same CBP squads “radicalized, criminal agencies” who “are destroying families and killing innocent children.”
You read that right. Child killers.
The four also called them a “deportation force that openly commits human rights abuses and refuses to be held accountable to the American people.”
But back to these radicals’ civil war with Pelosi. Tlaib was asked what she would say to the Speaker? “Uplift the women, especially the women of color within your caucus that are out there…I’ve got to tell you, it is very disappointing that the Speaker would ever try to diminish our voices in so many ways.”
Nancy Pelosi of radical San Francisco, of all people, whose historic rise to power during the first decade of the 21st century was supposed to be the left taking over, is really just akin to some passively sexist, segregationist dinosaur of the Democratic Party’s bygone era?
Open Borders, Millions of Future Votes
Now if these four don’t want the almost $3 billion in the bill that is specifically allocated for care of unaccompanied children, what exactly do they want?
With a sly smile, Tlaib noted that “in the ’80s it was more that was coming across the border, and we didn’t do this. We allowed the asylum seekers to go through the legal process. We allowed community-based agencies to take the lead.”
The translation of this, of course, is that we let them in so they could get themselves to cities run by liberal Democrats, where they would receive any and all public services and aid that was available for poor American citizens.
Meaning we let them stay. Permanently.
“In the ’80s” refers to the impotent 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli immigration act signed into law by Ronald Reagan. It awarded amnesty to approximately 2.7 million of the 5 million-or-so illegal aliens in the U.S. at the time. But it also “left at least 2 million unauthorized immigrants untouched” who had arrived after 1982, as the Washington Post described the 1986 law’s failure a few years back. “And there was no real plan for this large pool of remaining immigrants. ‘Everyone assumed they would just leave, that the new employer restrictions would push them out,’” Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute told the Post.
“As it turns out, that didn’t happen” because “the bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community.” Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego told the Post how businesses were only required “to make sure their workers had paperwork that ‘reasonably appears on its face to be genuine.’ If the documents were decent fakes, that wasn’t the boss’s problem. In fact, employers were actually penalized if they scrutinized a worker’s nationality too aggressively.”
This is the system Tlaib and the other three want — as do plenty of their fellow Democrat politicians who see millions of new votes for their party on their way in the near future. A charade that masks the reality of an open border.
Tlaib told how during her visit last week to holding facilities at the border in Texas, a father “told me he was there for four days and he’s just been eating potato chips” and said: “I just want my son to be an American boy. I’m here because I have no other choice.”
Hundreds of millions of the world’s population, if not billions, want their sons to be American boys, and feel similarly desperate, whether it be from political persecution or economic hardship. America can’t take them all in. The rate of legal immigration is already high enough that it is engineering a political transformation of the country.
Perception of Power Is What Matters
There was more to Tlaib’s play of the race card. “People like us, people of color … we know what it feels like to be dehumanized. We know what it feels like to be brown and black in this country.” And Pelosi should “honor the fact that we are there, that 650,000 people are represented by each and every single one of us.”
The same case can be made for each of the 435 members of the House of Representatives. Are certain congressional seats of greater value because of the kind of constituents represented? Isn’t that idea racist? But Tlaib certainly seems to be saying something along those lines, contending “that there is some sort of, I think in many ways, something special about having a refugee, having a woman that, you know, has experienced alone what incarceration has done to her family, right?”
That was a reference to another of the four, Rep. Omar, who as a child lived in a refugee camp in Kenya. Experiences there, however, are nothing like what happens to illegals caught crossing our southern border; there are adults who have spent their entire lives in such dead-end camps, whereas our “refugees” can expect soon to have access to the vibrant U.S. economy even as illegal guests.
But according to Tlaib, “All of us have had these experiences that I think have been missing in the halls of Congress. Honor that. Respect that. Put us at the table. Let’s come up with a solution together.” She maintained, however, that compromise was out: “still I will not support anything that is broken and that dehumanizes people.”
Apart from Omar, it’s mysterious what “experiences” Tlaib means. Another of the four freshmen, Rep. Pressley of Massachusetts, graduated from the north side of Chicago’s exclusive Francis W. Parker School, founded in 1901. Its alumni include Pulitzer-winning playwright David Mamet and Hollywood stars like Celeste Holm and Daryl Hannah. Its tuition is in the tens of thousands of dollars.
There are also no known refugee camps in Yorktown Heights in New York State’s high-income Westchester County, where Ocasio-Cortez spent almost all her childhood and adolescent years.
“Honor that. Respect that. Put us at the table” — these are classic demands characteristic of the left, no matter how few people they represent. In 1903, for instance, “at a party congress, Lenin won a membership issue by a single vote,” American Thinker journalist Monica Showalter points out. “But from then on he called his faction ‘the Bolsheviks,’ or majoritarians, and his opponents ‘Mensheviks,’ or minoritarians. It didn’t matter that the Bolsheviks never were a true majority among Russia’s revolutionaries; what mattered was the perception of power.”
Indeed, the very first of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals is: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
Everyone knew the “War Between the Factions” within the Democratic Party would be bloody, but Nancy Pelosi may not have thought the most toxic political weapon of mass destruction — race — was going to be used against her less than six months into her return to the Speakership.
— Written by Thomas McArdle
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