No. of Recommendations: 0
You are right about that. There is a lot of Rancor over Lankford back in his home state of OK. I don't follow him at all but I personally thought the provisions as described by Lankford over the weekend were reasonable and ones I could support. Now if the bill actually gets released that way is another matter.Lankford needs to un-marry mentally this legislation (people marry their ideas more tightly than their actual spouses)...because it's leading him to say weird things in public:
https://archive.is/WnXElvia
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lankford-cites-el...Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., cited the "presidential election year" in explaining on Sunday why Republicans are backing away from the border bill he is negotiating with Senate Democrats, arguing that the supplemental package, contrary to the assertion by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is "not about letting 5,000 people in a day." Because criticizing your own team always helps.
"The challenge that Sen. Cruz has and a bunch of other folks is they're still waiting to be able to read the bill on this. And this has been our great challenge of being able to fight through the final words, to be able to get the bill text out so people can hear it. Right now there's internet rumors is all that people are running on. It would be absolutely absurd for me to agree to 5,000 people a day," Lankford told "Fox News Sunday" host Shannon Bream. "This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day. There's no amnesty."Okay, Senator. We'll play along. Where does the "trigger" language come from? Why is it very specific in terms of numbers?
Then he says
In the past four months, Lankford said, there's only been seven days when less than 5,000 people have crossed the border in one day. "This is set up for if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down. No one gets in," he said of the bill. "This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker saying, I'm going to let one more. And we're at 4,999, and then it has to stop. It is a shutdown of the border and everyone actually gets turned around." Okay. So if nobody's got the proverbial clicker at teh border, then what criteria is being used to count?
Here's the really silly comment:
"Republicans four months ago would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy. So we actually locked arms together and said, we're not going to give you money for this. We want a change in law. And now it's interesting, a few months later, when we're finally going to the end, they're like, 'Oh, just kidding. I actually don't want a change in law,'" Lankford said. "We all have an oath to the Constitution, and we have a commitment to say we're going to do whatever we can to be able to secure the border."So just pass the thing for the sake of passing it? That's how you get things like Obamacare: bills that suck but let's pass them to find out what's in them. No thanks.
I'll withhold final judgement until actual legislation appears, but if this trigger nonsense is in it then it's a bad bill that should be DOA.
Here's a very simple logical test for the Trigger Supporters: What about the first 5,000 people to run across the border illegally is actually legal?
