During a recent hearing of the House Oversight Committee, the panel’s top Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) condemned what he termed the “do-nothing MAGA Republicans” currently steering the ship on the other side of the rhetorical aisle.
“So—with no positive program on infrastructure, health care, education, or anything else to run on—the do-nothing MAGA Republicans are hoping that sitting around and demagoguing the issue of immigration, while not addressing it in any serious way, will be their ticket back to the White House,” Raskin said. “Then Trump can resume the real work he wants to do: pocketing tens of millions or billions of dollars from foreign governments like Communist China and the murderous monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. But MAGA Republicans forget that, as with reproductive freedom, the American people have real values on immigration.”
The problem, as argued by Raskin, seems well-exemplified in recent comments from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican.
Like others in his party, Johnson has harped on the supposed need for changes in immigration and border policy above a lot else — and yet, he rejected even the possibility of a $14 billion spending proposal from the White House targeted to that area. And at a press conference this week, Johnson also rebuffed the idea of presently pursuing specifically what he termed “comprehensive” immigration reform at all. That commentary accompanies his recent and unequivocal condemnation of claimed tenets to an immigration proposal in the Senate.
That list included an expansion in the yearly allocation of green cards allowing non-citizens to live and work in the United States by 50,000. Republicans in the House have been sticking insistently to their most partisan proposals, giving their own efforts an air of unseriousness considering the bipartisan cooperation absolutely required for getting almost anything done because Democrats currently control the Senate — and, of course, the White House.
