Joni Ernst: Democrats Trying to Get People ‘Comfortable’ in Poverty, More ‘Reliant’ on Government
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told Breitbart News Saturday that Democrats, whom she said are moving toward socialism, are attempting to jam through radical agenda items designed to make people “comfortable” living in poverty instead of lifting them up, and she blasted the failure of what she dubbed “Bidenomics” as Democrats seek to solve the issues, such as inflation, by raising taxes and spending even more.
Speaking to Breitbart News Saturday, Ernst dismissed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) latest maneuver, scheduling a vote on an infrastructure plan despite lawmakers not having even seen the text of a bill.
“We have not seen a bill. I have not seen the text of a bill, and yet Chuck Schumer says we’re going to vote on it next week. I don’t know how we do that when we don’t know what’s in the package,” she said, expressing hope that the bipartisan group of lawmakers will tell Schumer to slow down and get text out to members so they can review it.
Americans, she said, want infrastructure, but they do not want the “extraneous” things Democrats are attempting to shove through, such as Green New Deal agenda items, in a second bill via the reconciliation process.
“This is extremely disturbing. What they are planning to do, even if the bipartisan infrastructure bill gets done, what they are planning to do is what they are now calling human infrastructure. Really what that means? A bunch of socialized programs that will expand … [what they call] the war on poverty, basically,” Ernst said, noting the “billions and billions” that have been spent on the war on poverty through the years.
“But simply making people comfortable in poverty doesn’t defeat poverty, but that’s what they’re planning to do — is continue to expand these existing social welfare programs, get people comfortable living with less, reliant upon government, and then, it’s really hard to undo those social welfare programs,” she explained, adding the public would be outraged over spending as much as $3.5 trillion years ago.
And the spending goes beyond social welfare programs, too, she continued.
LISTEN:
“This is an expansion of not only those social welfare programs, but also, as you pointed out, things like the Green New Deal, entirely focusing on electric vehicles rather than continuing to work with the vehicles we have now, expanding that infrastructure, paying for, you know, the grid and updating so we can support those electric vehicles,” she said, adding that such is not realistic for the Hawkeye State.
It is an “interesting dynamic,” given that Democrats are going to attempt to “jam through” the massive spending bill through reconciliation “with absolutely no Republicans supporting it,” she observed.
“And it’s not to save the taxpayers dollars. It’s to force them to pay more,” she added, also blasting Democrats for attempting to jam amnesty through in the reconciliation bill, even though it has nothing to do with the budget.
She said Americans can expect to see Democrats engaging in what she described as a “bunch of policy gymnastics” to get their radical agenda items through.
“They can’t do this. Now, reconciliation is a process that is focused on the budget. So what you will see coming from the left is they will do a bunch of policy gymnastics to try and get it fit in a reconciliation package. No. It should not. These are policy issues that we need to have debates on, we need to have discussions on. It needs to be done in open and transparent manners,” Ernst continued. “They can’t just flip it into a bill, ram it through reconciliation when it is policy.”
Biden, the Iowa Republican added, created a humanitarian crisis on the southern border as the United States sees “thousands and thousands” crossing the border.
“And yet, in contrast, we have interpreters in Afghanistan that have assisted our troops for the past two decades, that the Biden administration cannot seem to get its State Department in order to get those interpreters and their families out. You know, if anyone is deserving of an opportunity here in the United States, it’s those that have assisted us through wartime. And yet, Joe Biden can’t see the irony in the situation,” she added.
As for her state, Ernst said people are fed up with the Biden administration’s policies, and she expressed hope for 2022, agreeing that the road to the GOP taking back the House and Senate goes through Iowa.
“We are seeing it in every corner of our state and everywhere in between and no wonder — because we look at this administration and what the Democrats are doing, and since Joe Biden has been in office, he’s created this huge humanitarian and national security crisis at the southern border,” she said, also mentioning inflation and spikes in crime.
Instead of addressing inflation, the Democrats are “trying to outbid one another over a massive government spending program which we truly believe is a step toward socialism,” she stated.
“Iowans are fed up,” she said, adding that Democrats simply want to continue to raise taxes and “literally put the government in charge of everything.”
“We can’t afford to continue down this path,” according to Ernst, later noting the “phenomenal” level of excitement in the state for the GOP. She noted that Republicans have a “prime opportunity” to seize the seat in the state’s 3rd District, currently held by Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA).
Iowa, Ernst added, “continues to trend red as the Democrats continue to move toward socialism.”
Judge: DACA Violates Americans’ Workplace Rights
President Barack Obama’s “DACA” work-permit program is illegal because it violates the immigration laws that protect working Americans from losing jobs and wages to illegal migrants, a Texas judge wrote Friday.
“Even Defendants-Intervenors’ own experts could not escape the reality that DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] congests the workforce,” wrote Judge Andrew Hanen of the United States District Court in Houston.
The pro-DACA team admitted that “[W]ork authorizations and deferral from deportation provided by DACA allow recipients to better compete with legally present workers,” Hanen wrote on page 19 of the July 16, 77-page decision.
The decision bars the award of additional work permits to DACA migrants but does not yet revoke the work permits held by roughly 650,000 illegals.
The judge’s emphasis on Americans’ workplace rights also prompted him to warn officials at the Department of Homeland Security against other amnesty-style programs that would threaten Americans, including policies that “parole” many foreigners into the United States.
The offer of parole, Hanen wrote:
…is designed to be awarded only “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” … Congress did not intend advance “parole authority as our immigration policy, or to supplement current immigration categories without Congressional approval.”
DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas is now parolling thousands of foreigners into the country under the moral claim that they deserve reunification with their related migrants who are living in the United States.
Mayorkas has promised to put the “dignity” of migrants “foremost ” in his policies, despite the widely recognized harm of cheap migrant labor to Americans in their national labor market
Nearly all reports by establishment media outlets downplayed Hanen’s analysis of Americans’ right to a national labor market. Instead, those media reports lamented the loss of employment for illegal aliens, especially for the relatively few DACA migrants with university educations. The New York Times reported one example, July 16:
Sarahi Magallanez, a psychology student in Los Angeles, is among thousands of young immigrants still waiting for the approval of new applications.
On hearing the news, she cried: “Oh, no. No. No. This is just really bad.”
Ms. Magallanez said she had received a notification from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Tuesday that her application had been received and was being processed.
“I was banking on this to start my career,” she said, breaking into tears. “Now there is a chance I can’t. DACA is not safe, and we are at the mercy of whoever is in power.”
The New York Times did not mention that many Americans hope to earn decent salaries with their psychology degrees.
CBS News reported:
“I have not been able to stop crying,” [Marilu] Saldaña, who was brought to the U.S. as a 13-year-old, told CBS News. “It’s so frustrating because this was the year that I was going to go to college. I want to become a nurse. I feel like I’m going to have to wait again.”
Many Americans also want to get decently-paid jobs as nurses.
In 2020, roughly 92,000 Americans died from a toxic combination of poverty, drugs, loneliness, and hopelessness, often in heartland regions ignored by the coastal investors who prefer to hire the cheap immigrant labor that is delivered to the coastal states by the federal government.
Americans from many states – such as Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Sen. Joe Manchin’s West Virginia — lose jobs and wages when employers can hire illegals, Hanen wrote on page 55:
DACA’s work authorization also undermines the [1986] Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The Supreme Court has “often recognized that a ‘primary purpose in restricting immigration is to preserve jobs for American workers.'” … In 1986, “Congress enacted as a comprehensive framework for ‘combating the deployment of illegal aliens.'” … IRCA made it “illegal for employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized workers.” … Thus, it is illegal for employers to hire illegal aliens, including those eligible for DACA, but for the fact tax allows its recipients to obtain work authorization.
DACA actually goes further to undermine Congress’s intent to protect American workers as it requires applicants to apply for work authorization … The DACA program is therefore contrary to the immigration statutes and to Congress’s goal of “closely guarding access to work authorization and preserving jobs for those lawfully in the country.”
The judge noted that Texas and other states that filed the lawsuit also said the DACA giveaway damages Americans’ wages as well as their jobs:
According to the Plaintiff States, DACA bypasses Congress’s comprehensive immigration framework to grant lawful presence, and therefore work authorizations, to unlawfully present individuals. DACA recipients may then compete with legally present individuals for available jobs … (stating the presence of DACA recipients leads to an increase in competition among similarly skilled workers in the workplace, and impacts wages).
The public’s reliance on the workplace safeguards set by immigration laws was ignored by government officials when they set up the DACA program, Hanen wrote on page 74:
… for decades, the states and their residents have relied upon DHS (and its predecessors) to protect their employees by enforcing the law as Congress has written it. Once again, neither the DACA Memorandum nor its underlying record gives any consideration of these reliance interests.
That “reliance” claim is a jab at the U.S. Supreme court, which blocked President Donald Trump’s cancellation of DACA on the ground that his deputies did not adequately recognize the reliance of migrants on their DACA work permits.
On page 64, Hanen said the claims by DACA advocates would allow Presidents to award work permits to as many foreigners as he wishes:
Using the Government’s logic, echoed by the Defendant-Intervenors in this case, the Executive Branch could theoretically still give every illegal alien currently resident in the United States lawful status, if DHS were to do it in smaller numbers, group-by-group. This cannot be a correct interpretation of the law.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce. They are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants, and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal immigration, visa workers, and illegal migration undermine democratic self-government, fracture Americans’ society, move money away from Americans’ pocketbooks, and worsen living costs for American families. Migration moves wealth from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
The case is Texas v. United States, No. 1:18-cv-00068 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
No Silver Lining: Wages Fell While Inflation Soared This Spring
A rapid rise in prices over the past year has not been matched by wage gains, indicating American workers are losing ground, data from the Department of Labor showed Friday.
Median weekly earnings of the nation’s 113.6 million full-time wage and salary workers were $990 in the second quarter of 2021 , the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 1.2 percent lower than a year earlier.
That compares with a gain of 4.8 percent in the Consumer Price Index over the same period.
That means inflation-adjusted wages are down six percent. Or, to flip it around, wage-adjusted prices are up six percent.
Either way you look at it, it is bad news for American workers.
Adding to the furstration of workers and employers, on average enhanced unemployment benefits pays around $620, which means many unemployed are receiving nearly 2/3 of the median weekly wage for people working full time.
In fact, unemployment pays significantly more than the median wage of $596 per week for women aged 16 to 24 and close to the $643 paid to their male peers. No wonder employers say it is hard to find new workers.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas: DACA Being Ruled Illegal Must Not Derail Biden’s Amnesty Agenda
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says a ruling that deemed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program unconstitutional must not derail President Joe Biden’s amnesty agenda.
On Friday, Hanen ruled that the Obama administration had illegally implemented the DACA program to shield hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from deportation. The program, Hanen ordered, must be effectively shut down to new, illegal alien applicants.
Mayorkas, nominated by Biden and approved by the Senate, said he is “disappointed” by DACA’s being ruled unconstitutional but that it must not prevent the administration from ramming through their plan to give amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.
“I am disappointed by yesterday’s ruling and its impact on families across the country, but it will not derail our efforts to protect Dreamers,” Mayorkas said in a statement:
The Biden-Harris Administration — and this country — remain as committed as ever to ensuring that Dreamers are protected from the threat of deportation and are allowed to continue to contribute to this country that is their home. DHS remains focused on safeguarding DACA, and we will engage the public in a rulemaking process to preserve and fortify DACA. [Emphasis added]
Mayorkas also said that Biden’s Department of Justice “intends to appeal” the DACA ruling but admitted that the administration must now rely on the little-known reconciliation maneuver whereby Senate Democrats could sneak an amnesty in a budget with no filibuster threat while only needing 51 votes to approve.
“Still, only the passage of legislation will give full protection and a path to citizenship to DACA recipients,” Mayorkas continued:
In January, President Biden offered a legislative proposal, and in March the House of Representatives passed the ‘American Dream and Promise Act.’ I urge Congress to act swiftly to enact legislation through the reconciliation process to provide permanent protection that the American people want and Dreamers have earned. [Emphasis added]
Should Democrats try to sneak an amnesty into a budget via reconciliation, it will be up to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to halt the plan on the grounds that the measure is not budget-related but actually alters federal immigration law. MacDonough previously stopped Democrats from increasing the federal minimum wage visa reconciliation.
Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.
Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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