The Senate’s parliamentarian will hold a formal hearing on Friday where Democrats will claim they can insert four gigantic amnesties in the pending $3.5 trillion budget bill.
The news comes as business groups — including Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us — accelerate their amnesty lobbying with front-page ads in the Washington Post , a petition from supportive politicians , and a skewed poll that managed to get only 34 percent “strong ” support for the wealth-shifting amnesties.
The parliamentarian’s decision is critical to the amnesty because the Democrats know they cannot get 60 votes in a normal Senate debate.
But if the amnesty is allowed into the unusual “budget reconciliation” bill, it can pass the Senate with the Democrats’ 50 Senators plus the tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats expect they can overpressure possible resistance from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) or Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), whose poor state will be further sidelined by the amnesty and the subsequent rush of more illegal migrants.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, will make her decision after the Friday argument.
Activists from Amnesty International , America’s Voice, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Church World Service (CWS) hold a civil disobedience protest in front of the U.S. Capitol. (OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty)
She may exclude the amnesties because they are policy priorities marketed as budget matters. If so, her decision would likely end the Democrats’ push in 2021. She is a former immigration lawyer — but a lawyer for the government, not a lawyer for foreign clients who are seeking to get U.S. citizenship.
During her term in office, she has already rejected claims by both parties. The Hill.com wrote :
In 2017, she warned that a Senate GOP’s plan for repealing ObamaCare didn’t comply with the rules. And earlier this year, she warned Democrats that their $15 per hour minimum wage plan couldn’t be passed under the budget process, resulting in it being stripped out of the bill in the Senate.
MacDonough will face tremendous pressure and will be offered many rationalizations from Democrats and the many business groups that want more imported workers, consumers, and renters.
If she rejects the pro-amnesty claims, Democrats can replace her — unless a few Democratic Senators privately tell Democratic leaders that they will vote against the amnesty if the parliamentarian is removed. Some Democrats make the private threat because the amnesty will tilt the nation’s economy further in favor of the wealthy coastal states and against smaller states such as New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, and New Mexico.
Democrats are presenting the amnesties as just rewards to the four groups of illegals: Those who were hired by employers for Americans’ jobs in sectors deemed “critical ” by the government, those who are hired by farm companies to minimize spending on wage-boosting machinery, illegals who won “Temporary Protected Status ” when their home countries were temporarily damaged by war or natural disasters, and illegals who were brought into the United States by their illegal-migrant parents .
Immigrants and supporters demonstrate during a rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in front of the White House on September 5, 2017 in Washington DC. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP/Getty)
The proposed amnesties impose huge costs on Americans. But they include no reforms that would reduce the burden of future illegal and legal migration into Americans’ workplaces, housing markets, schools, and politics.
This push is being funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors who stand to gain from more cheap labor , government-aided consumers , and urban renters . The network has funded many astroturf campaigns , urged Democrats not to talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media .
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in early 2021. But copies exist at the other sites .
The group has used its contacts in the White House to surround Biden with pro-amnesty advocates — including invited groups of illegal migrants — and to feed him poll-tested pitches :
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 against the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
Labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages , raises their rents , curbs their productivity , shrinks their political clout , widens regional wealth gaps , and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture .
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 pocketbook opposition is multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
Marvin Argueta from El Salvador speaks as people attend a protest supporting DACA at Foley Square in New York, on August 17, 2021. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty)
Recent polls show lopsided “strong” public opposition — for example, 41 percent to 14 percent — to Biden’s immigration policies. An August 28-30 poll of 1,997 registered voters shows Biden with 55 percent opposition and just 36 percent support. In April, the same polling group showed Biden had 45 percent opposition and 43 percent support on immigration, marking a 17-point shift from April to September.
Also, Democratic voters show modest interest in the proposed amnesty, despite the massive astroturf spending. Just four out of 285 Democrats — or 1.4 percent — polled in August said “immigration” is a top problem, according to an August 24 statement from Gallup.
However, the GOP’s opposition to the amnesties has been tepid — largely because the GOP’s top donors want more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and room-sharing renters.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is also worsening our already dangerous immigration crisis. Tens of thousands Afghans are being brought into the country, with little serious vetting to discriminate between those who served loyally with our troops and intelligence agencies; and those who just want a better life or have more sinister motives. This new influx comes on top of the one million migrants who have crossed our southern border just since Biden’s inauguration. All these new migrants are being dispersed throughout the country at taxpayer expense.
This process of transforming American identity and its defining political principles and virtues has been going on since the feckless 1965 immigration bill, which provided entrance to family members of immigrants, multiplying their numbers by as much as a factor of 8. The political and economic motives for this weakening of our border have likewise long been obvious––voters for progressives, cheap labor for free marketeers.
But another dubious idea has developed to justify our and Europe’s porous borders: Replacement Migrations. Pursuing this short-sighted idea will accelerate the dilution of national identity, an outcome progressives fervently desire as a mechanism for transforming our Constitutional order of divided government, federalism, and unalienable rights into technocratic rule by a “managerial elite.” Those technocrats’ utopian ideals like “equity” an “social justice” will further compromise the rights and freedoms of others.
The pretextual rationale for Replacement Migration is pragmatic: Europe and, in recent years, the U.S. are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain populations through internal growth. The U.S. rate, for example, has declined to 1.64 child per woman from the 2.1 child needed to maintain the population. Combined with medical treatments that extend longevity, this decline in reproduction means fewer younger workers contributing payroll taxes to support greater numbers of those receiving public subsidies. These trends have put programs like Medicare and Social Security on track to run out of money. The UN’s solution is Replacement Migration––importing more-fecund young immigrants, legal or otherwise, to make up the worker deficit.
Hence the erosion of our immigration laws, despite the dangers of lax immigration policies that take in peoples from less advanced regions with cultural, social, and religious customs hostile to the host countries’. In Europe, for example, generous welfare subsidies to migrants combined with restrictions on employment have created a sullen generation of Muslim immigrants exploited by jihadist recruiters working out of some of the many mosques that have arisen across Europe. In addition to the terrorist attacks that follow, migrant participation in crime, especially rape, is much greater than their share of the total population.
Moreover, in many countries, significant numbers of Muslim immigrants are segregated into “no go” neighborhoods or towns where they indulge their cultural and religious practices, such as honor-killing and polygamy, inimical to the liberal democratic principles of their host governments. These developments are the wages of failing to demand assimilation to the host country and its social and political culture.
This tendency towards Balkanization by unfettered immigration was remarked on in 1968 by British PM Enoch Powell in his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech decrying England’s feckless immigration policies and failure to require assimilation: “Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. . . Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest.”
These dysfunctions, moreover, are abetted by progressive elites of the host countries, including the U.S., who have endorsed the illiberal assumptions of multiculturalism and grievance politics, particularly the right of non-Western peoples to some sort of reparations for the West’s alleged imperial and colonial sins. A fashionable guilt has developed among progressive cognitive elites that inhibits requiring immigrants, particularly “people of color,” to assimilate to the host country. Such a demand is deemed “racist” and “xenophobic.”
This guilty deference communicates national weakness and a civilizational failure of nerve, a trend that also was noticed years ago in French travel-writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints , which is featured in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s index librorum prohibitorum. The story follows a spontaneous mass migration of millions of Third World poor to the south of France, whence they spread across Europe and eventually occupy it. When the French consul in India hears a Catholic bishop say he approves of the migration and is proud to be “bearing witness” to it, the consul retorts, “Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civilization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you’ve become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren’t any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in.”
So too today, when the decades-long denigration of our national identity has over the last several years been intensified by specious ideas like “Critical Race Theory” and the “1619 Project.” Destroying our history is a means to discredit it and its political principles, clearing the space for their replacement by more collectivist and technocratic ones. Third World immigrants are weapons in this war against our heritage, and so progressives cities create suicidal policies like “sanctuary cities” where federal immigration law is nullified, and criminal illegal aliens prey on their fellow migrants and American citizens alike.
Whether by design or not, Replacement Migration is a way to transform the character of a nation. The globalist, supranational cognitive elite has for a century been denigrating national identity in favor of an imagined “global community” comprising “citizens of the world,” something that exists only for those same elites whose jobs regularly take them abroad where they socialize with other elites. For the rest of the world, identity is created by a distinct national identity comprising language, customs, mores, and traditions different from those of other nations.
But national identity based on a political system that guarantees citizen participation and unalienable individual rights for all is not the same thing as the “blood and soil” diseased nationalism of Nazi Germany. Without the affection of people for their country and their shared identity, a nation becomes defined by mere geographic proximity and shared consumption of products and popular culture. As historian Michael Burleigh rhetorically asks,
Can any nation survive without a consensus on values that transcend special interests, and which are non-negotiable in the sense of “Here we stand”? Can a nation state survive that is only a legal and political shell, or a “market state” for discrete ethnic or religious communities that share little by way of common values other than use of the same currency? Can a society survive that is not the object of commitments to its core values or a focus for the fundamental identity of all its members?
In a country like ours where multicultural identity politics divides citizens into victims and oppressors based on accidents of superficial appearance, the answer is no. “It is inhuman,” French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut writes, “to define man by blood and soil but no less inhuman to leave him stumbling through life with the terrestrial foundations of his existence taken out from under him.” And it is dangerous when the world is full of aggressors who have no doubt about the worth of their own national identities.
Apart from its doubtful efficacy, Replacement Migration without strict protocols for vetting immigrants and encouraging them to assimilate to our political principles further erodes the foundations of our political order in unalienable rights that transcend exclusive ethnic identities. And that ultimately leads to national suicide.
Biden Builds the Taliban Back Better: Weapons, Military Equipment Fuel Resurgent Islamists ZAKERIA HASHIMI/AFP via Getty Images 7:07
President Joe Biden has dubbed his presidential agenda “Build Back Better,” but instead of rebuilding America, he has so far only succeeded in building back the Taliban better with billions of dollars in American weaponry.
The billions of dollars in American taxpayer-funded military equipment are now in the hands of the Taliban, to use against Afghans who until last month were partnered with the U.S. government.
The Taliban is also using that equipment to quell the last bit of anti-Taliban resistance in the country.
And the equipment is somehow also falling into the hands of Iran, America’s top adversary in the region. An Iranian Telegram channel recently released images of U.S. military vehicles in Iran, according to the BBC .
According to the British-based Times ,
The U.S. has spent nearly $84 billion dollars on training, equipping, and otherwise building the Afghan security forces between 2002 and 2018, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published on January 27, 2021.
That figure tracks closely with figures published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on July 30, 2021, which said cumulative appropriations for the Afghan Security Forces Fund stood at nearly $82.90 billion, with more than $76.19 billion having been obligated and more than $75.20 billion disbursed.
The U.S. also turned over at least 10 military facilities worth billions of dollars to the previous Afghan government, which are also now in the hands of the Taliban. Bagram Airfield, which was turned over to the now-defunct Afghan Ministry of Defense on July 1, 2021, was valued at $565,840,912, according to SIGAR .
A recent Sunday Times article graphic showed how much U.S. military equipment had been supplied to Afghan security forces, citing the GAO.
Oryx, a military equipment blog, has tried to do an accounting of all the U.S. military equipment that is known to have been captured by the Taliban.
According to Oryx , the Taliban have captured at least 12 tanks; 51 armored fighting vehicles; 61 artillery and mortars; eight anti-aircraft guns; and 1,980 military trucks, vehicles, and Jeeps.
Also according to Oryx , the Taliban have also captured at least a dozen American-supplied fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft — including a A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft; a Cessna 208; UH-60A Blackhawk transport helicopters; MD-530F attack helicopters; and Boeing Insitu ScanEagle drones. They have also captured Russian-made Mi-17 transport and Mi-35 attack helicopters.
This list does not even include small arms, including M4 and M16 rifles, M24 sniper rifles, and M2 .50 caliber machine guns, nor does it include ammunition, communications equipment, night-vision goggles, or biometric devices used to identify Afghans who assisted Americans.
And the blog’s authors say their counts of equipment are based on photographic evidence only and not all Taliban members have high-end cell phones.
The White House has been vague about how much U.S. military equipment may have fallen into Taliban hands. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said at a White House briefing on August 17:
We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone. But certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban, and, obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki became defensive when asked about leaving the Taliban with military equipment at a briefing on August 30. “Certainly our objective was not to leave them with any equipment but that is not always an option when you are looking to retrograde and move out of a war zone,” she said.
However, Democrats have resisted Republican efforts to find out how much equipment was left for the Taliban.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) proposed an amendment during a September 1 House Oversight Committee business meeting that would ask the Pentagon inspector general to figure out what and how much military equipment has been seized by the Taliban.
“The Taliban is now armed with significant resources, equipment, arms, artillery, helicopters, drones, weapons, ammunitions from the United States. You name it, they have it. We even gave the Taliban an air force in recent weeks,” she said, adding that reports of Iran buying equipment from the Taliban is “enormously problematic” and “does impact our national security.”
Retired Lt. Col. Oliver North said in a recent interview on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily that the Taliban, Islamic State-Khorasan, and the Haqqani Network, would collectively become the “best armed criminal enterprise in the history of mankind” due to the haul left behind by the U.S.
He also predicted some of it will be sold to China and Russia and be reverse-engineered and used against the United States in other campaigns.
“What’s happening to a lot of it is that they’re being dragged across the border in Conex boxes and on trucks [to Pakistan],” he said.
“They’re going to be heading to the port where they will be loaded aboard a ship and taken to communist China for exploitation. That’s what’s happening to anywhere between five and ten of every piece of equipment. The Taliban, by the way, are getting rich on this. They’re selling them,” he said.
Even now, the equipment is being used to snuff out the anti-Taliban resistance in the Panjshir Valley — which had not even been overcome during the Russian occupation.
Times
I noticed too that his hands were secured behind his back with American handcuffs. The fact that his wrists were bonded by steel etched with the words Peerless Handcuff Company Springfield MA seemed somehow more grotesque than any other detail beneath the angry blue of the late summer sky as the last pocket of defiance to Taliban rule in Afghanistan was extinguished.
Donald Trump Jr. quipped in a tweet on Tuesday, “The only thing Joe Biden ‘Built back better’ was the Taliban.”
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook .
Complete the wall...around Biden
Let's hope Joe Biden has finally gone a fib too far, taking to the airways with false indignation to harangue us for daring to question his execution of the lethally inept Afghanistan "retrograde" action he engineered along with his Team of Trivials. Biden's purpose was to obscure the fact that he'd blithely and needlessly thrust fine, dedicated troops into a tactical straitjacket that could logically have had no other result than multiple casualties — perhaps in the process causing some heretofore tightly shut eyes to be pried open concerning the character and abilities of our overmatched chief executive.
If there is any degree of justice in the world, across this nation, many self-anointed sophisticates are staring at the yellowing diplomas hanging on their walls, contemplating how people so demonstrably smart and accomplished could have been so utterly misguided in their 2020 assessment of presidential fitness.
It's unfortunate that we don't have the voter equivalent of a remedial safe driving course.
Somehow, some way, over his many years of feeding at the public trough (and multi-national deals), Mr. Biden has succeeded in cultivating the image of an amiable, even-tempered spinner of yarns, whose repertoire of self-aggrandizing tales served — at least in his mind — as parables illustrating deeper truths. And if, in pursuit of his overarching message, the factual bases of these stories were suspect, then what of it? Underneath it all, Joe's a good egg, don't you know, so why don't we just let it slide?
That protective aura, of a good-natured, basically decent guy despite his obvious intellectual shortcomings and weird personal peccadilloes, made — along with COVID-19 and its concomitant voting irregularities — Biden the un-Trump and his presidency possible. But it's also catapulted one of the biggest liars in American public life into a position he can't successfully navigate through the copious shoveling of BS.
To the vast majority of readers who frequent this site, Mr. Biden's disastrous incompetence is by no means a surprise. Indeed, we've all pretty much known from his first day in office that one way or another, a nightmare was in the offing, and national humiliation would likely ensue. But as in all bad dreams, warning cries were — with the suffocating pillow of Big Tech and corporate media — effectively muffled. Usually, with little effect, our families, friends, and co-workers were issued warnings that in both temperament and judgment, Joe Biden was wholly unsuited for the presidency — and one needn't be an unabashed Trump-admirer to know it.
Well, that's all water under the bridge now. A more relevant question is, what aspect of Biden's uniformly miserable presidential performance will produce disillusionment in sufficient measure to cause his abandonment while there's still time to spare the country the permanent harm we're barreling toward?
The pile of lies as destructive to Biden's credibility, as if it were a mound of dynamite, ever grows. Things big and small — reflexive lying even when there is no discernible benefit and certainly no need. Lying so transparent that it doesn't even require pointing out, and so frequent it sometimes seems he isn't even aware of it. A man who is — as frightening as it sounds — programmed to lie, as he did time and again in his clearly rehearsed late August display of arrogance and ill temper.
The public's reaction to Biden's serial lies will be as much a test of America's moral condition as it is his . The party he leads shares his state of decrepitude, so the obvious constitutional remedies of impeachment and removal, or the never really tried invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, are probably not presently viable.
So what is to be done? How can we rescue the country without running roughshod over our laws, traditions, and moral constraints?
I believe that the Founders have built into our system, with its various layers of government, the flexibility to put the protective wall around Biden and Harris that they refuse to erect on our southern border.
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people immediately surrounding them must be placed in a kind of governmental quarantine, causing problematic but still necessary federal gridlock for a time. It will require many acts of principled insubordination of the type we recently saw from Marine Lt. Colonel Scheller. Patriots of good faith across the nation must be willing to put careers, even perhaps their very freedom, at risk. Acts of refusal must emerge from across the spectrum of government and bureaucracy; compelling the Deep State to recognize that alas, Donald Trump was not quite the worst thing that could have befallen us.
The release of the transcript of the egregious Biden/Ghani phone call may have been the first step in this crucial epiphany.
There are enough remaining centers of competence and authority in our state and local governments and federal agencies to provide for the nation's minimal needs during this "time out" on presidential authority until the political landscape is such that constitutional removal or subsequent rejection by the electorate is possible.
Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans must declare that the Afghan debacle has put the country in deep, imminent peril, and until such time as the president agrees to finally secure our borders, no cooperation — on infrastructure or anything else — is possible. Biden won't accept this, but most loyal Americans will see its clear wisdom. And if Mr. McConnell makes his argument cogently, and gets the "bi-partisans" in line, he'll start the ball rolling to send Biden to his room.
Naturally, this course of action is fraught with risks. There will be charges of sedition, even treason bandied about, and in some quarters, sporadic violence of the kind we saw in 2020 may erupt as the Democrats call their minions into the streets. Foreign enemies may — if they don't already — see this as a propitious moment to move against our interests or allies. Therefore, strong, responsible new military leadership must emerge to stand guard over the nation's security while we sort out the political mess we've made for ourselves. This will not be an easy task, but is there really any alternative?
Joe Biden is not a well man, both physically and emotionally. The genuine tragedies he's encountered in his life have not imparted upon him the quiet empathy and understanding for which many had hoped, but instead rendered him scarred, damaged, and wholly unable to adequately meet his presidential obligations. For some reason, he's embarking us upon a national suicide mission, with the eager assistance of those both foreign and domestic who wish this country harm, even destruction.
It is up to Americans of good faith — of any political stripe — to put this self-destructive chapter to an end, while it can still be done by relatively peaceful and lawful means. Time is quickly running out.
Caricature by Donkey Hotey , CC BY 2.0 license.
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