America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Thursday, November 11, 2021
JOE BIDEN - FOLKS, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU WANT! - THIS IS AN OPEN BORDERS - NO LEGAL NEED APPLY OPEN BORDERS NATION!
Deported Rapist, Criminal Migrants, Found in Large Migrant Group near Border in West Texas
Big Bend Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended a large group of migrants near Alpine, Texas, including several previously deported criminal aliens. Those arrested included a deported rapist and a drug trafficker.
Alpine Station Border Patrol agents assigned to the Highway 118 immigration checkpoint on November 9 observed a box-style cargo truck approaching for inspection. During an initial screening, a Border Patrol K-9 alerted to an odor it is trained to detect, according to information obtained from Big Bend Sector officials.
The agents referred the driver to a secondary inspection station where a search of the cargo area revealed a false wall. Agents discovered a large group of migrants hidden behind the wall.
Agents removed 67 migrants from the dangerous compartment, officials stated. They identified the 67 migrants as citizens of El Salvador (3), Guatemala (19), Honduras (4), and Mexico (41).
Officials report the two false wall sections were bolted to the truck making escape from the container in the event of a crash or abandonment almost impossible. The agents identified four of the migrants as minors — age eight to 13. They also found a 17-year-old unaccompanied minor.
“Immigration checkpoints are an essential tool in the U.S. Border Patrol’s mission to protect our nation’s borders,” Big Bend Sector Chief Patrol Agent Sean McGoffin said in a written statement. “Transnational Criminal Organizations put profit over human life, often with devastating consequences.”
After transporting the 67 migrants to the Alpine Station for processing, the agents identified three of the migrants as having criminal histories in the United States and previous deportations.
One of the migrants is described by Chief McGoffin as a convicted sex offender. Criminal records indicate a California court in Santa Clara County convicted the migrant for Rape by Force/Fear and Obstruction/Resisting Officer in 2000, officials stated. The court sentenced the man to three years in prison and ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers removed him from the U.S.
The convicted rapist now faces federal felony charges for Re-Entry After Removal.
The other criminal aliens had convictions for Possession with Intent to Distribute Dangerous Drugs and Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude, officials stated.
Agents arrested the driver of the box truck, a U.S. citizen, on charges related to human smuggling.
“That unscrupulous smugglers put lives in danger to support their criminal activity is reprehensible,” Taekuk Cho, Acting Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations in El Paso, Texas, added. “Homeland Security Investigations continues to collaborate with our law enforcement partners to prevent Transnational Criminal Organizations from putting greed and profit before human life.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. (November 11, 2021) – Americans have watched the videos of the migrant caravans comprised of thousands of migrants from all over the world coming to the southern border. Americans have read the numbers - agents apprehended 1,659,206 illegal migrants in FY2021, an all-time record for apprehensions at the southwest border, and tens of thousands of ‘gotaways’ entered the country monthly. But most Americans have never heard the details of how the lack of operational control of the border impacts their fellow taxpaying countrymen, who live and work near the border.
Russell Johnson, a fourth generation cattle rancher who lives and works along eight miles of the border, joins Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, to discuss how illegal immigration effects his business and family and the impact of various policies adopted over the last 15 years. He describes the cost and time required to protect himself, his family and his property from a constant flow of trespassers.
“Private citizens should not have to maintain a national border,” states Johnson.
In the closing commentary, Krikorian comments on the news that the Department of Justice was planning to compensate illegal aliens who were “separated” from their families after they were caught trying to enter the country unlawfully during the Trump administration. Can these aliens, with the help of the ACLU, sue the U.S. government when the administration was merely enforcing laws passed by the U.S. Congress?
Biden Seeks To Prove That Crime Pays
Compensating illegal aliens supposedly separated at the border.
In Joe Biden’s America U.S. citizens face increasing scrutiny while illegal aliens are encouraged, aided, abetted and induced to enter the United States why whatever means possible. Furthermore, once in the United States, illegal aliens have nothing to fear. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of DHS the Department of Homeland Security, (Department of Homeland Surrender?) has ordered that agents of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will no longer arrest aliens who are working illegally or punish employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens. This was the focus of my recent article, Biden Admin Powers Up Magnet to Attract Even More Illegal Aliens.
This is all in direct contradiction to the provisions of a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S. Code § 1324.
While we consider terrorists, Biden and his Attorney General Garner are now Targeting American Parents who may question the curriculum that their own children are being indoctrinated with in American schools while blatantly ignoring how Biden’s Afghanistan Catastrophe Increases Terror Threat in US especially as our borders are now wide open and immigration law enforcement from within the interior of the United States has been all but terminated.
My dad sagely told me that nothing is so good it could not be made better or be so bad that it could not get worse.
How much worse could things get under Mr. Biden and his wrecking crew?
Consider that while Biden has proposed hiring an army of thousands of IRS agents to scrutinize the tax returns filed by Americans and drilling down into bank accounts with balances as low as $600 to make certain that the federal government captures every cent Americans taxpayers owe on November 6, 2021 the Washington Times reported, Biden: Migrant families separated at border deserve compensation.
President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions came up with the “Zero Tolerance” policy to attempt to discourage the human tsunami of illegal aliens who were pouring through the highly porous and dangerous U.S./Mexican border. The clear goal was to deter what could only be described as an invasion of the United States.
Under a the provisions of the Flores Decision, minor aliens cannot be held for more than 20 days. Human trafficking organizations quickly realized that they could use young aliens to compel immigration authorities to release aliens who were accompanied by what they claimed were their children even when they weren’t actually related.
I wrote about this in my article, Alien Smugglers Exploit Infants. My article included the link to an ICE press release issued on May 16, 2019 that addressed the discovery that a previously deported illegal alien was found wading across the Rio Grande with a 6 month old infant in his arms. Although he initially claimed it was his child, it was subsequently determined that he was not related to the infant.
WASHINGTON – A Honduran man attempting to cross the border with an unrelated 6-month-old infant last week underscores what U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents have described as an increasing trend of fraudulent families presenting at the border in order to take advantage of loopholes in immigration laws and avoid being detained by immigration authorities.
“Cases like this demonstrate the real danger that exists to children in this disturbing new trend,” said HSI Acting Executive Associate Director Alysa Erichs. “And while we have seen egregious cases of smugglers renting and recycling children, this case involving a six-month-old infant is a new low – and an unprecedented level of child endangerment.”
Amilcar Guiza-Reyes, a 51-year old citizen and national of Honduras, who was previously deported in 2013, made an initial appearance in federal court in the Southern District of Texas May 10, charged with 8 USC 1324 alien smuggling for allegedly smuggling a 6-month-old infant across the U.S.-Mexico border.
It is beyond outrageous for Mr. Biden to support the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars to illegal aliens who intentionally violated our borders and our immigration laws that are essential to national security, public safety, public health and the jobs and wages of Americans is more than outrageous. The message will be clear- for illegal aliens, the streets are indeed, paved with gold, the gold taken from the U.S. taxpayers to reward illegal aliens for violations of our laws.
Contrary to Mr. Biden’s claims- many children were separated from their parents long before they came to the U.S. / Mexican border. They were separated from their families back in their countries of origin- either because their parents were willing to “rent them out” or because they were kidnapped. Trump’s efforts to use DNA testing to determine if those claiming to be the parents of these children was rebuffed by the courts.
First of all, do not forget that lawyers from the ACLU are seeking this settlement. They would undoubtedly get a significant share from this abominable “settlement.” This simply adds yet another dimension to the immigration delivery system that provides an unlimited supply of foreign workers to compete with and displace American workers. An unlimited supply of foreign tourists, foreign students and, for the immigration lawyers- an unlimited supply of clients!
The ACLU is apparently looking for a huge payday!
Here are other factors to consider.
When people are arrested they are invariably separated from their children. As an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) Special Agent I participated in many arrests. Often I worked in close coordination with law enforcement officers of other agencies. I spent roughy half of my 30 year career working with the DEA, FBI, ATF and local and state police departments. (I was assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division of the DEA in New York City for four years and then promoted to the position of INS Senior Special Agent and assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force.)
When we knew in advance that children were likely to be found at the location where we were making going to make arrests, if both parents were named in arrest warrants, we arranged to have appropriate authorities from Child Welfare accompany us to take care of the children. We always felt terrible about the situations these children were placed as a consequence of their parents’ criminal activities.
Actions have consequences.
Mr. Biden claims to be concerned that children were separated from their parents because of President Trump’s policies. Today how many children’s lives are being endangered by his open-borders and other immigration policies driving unprecedented numbers of people including children to use pernicious sociopathic alien smugglers and human traffickers to head for the United States through incredibly dangerous terrain and conditions?
Additionally- if Mr Biden’s is truly concerned that children were supposedly separated from their parents because of policies of the government, that those who were made to suffer should be paid, then I have an additional proposal.
The separation of children from their families is indeed terrible. But there is another situation that has also results in the separation of children from their parents. But in this case their parents did nothing wrong but to be in the proverbial “wrong place at the wrong time.”
Their parents were killed by aliens who should not have been permitted to enter the United States nor to remain in the United States. In many instances these criminal aliens had been deported and illegally reentered the United States. Policies of Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary States resulted in detainers that were lodged by ICE to be ignored. These aliens who were in custody were turned loose and subsequently went on to kill and/or seriously injure innocent victims-thereby separating these victims - all too often permanently from their children.
Biden’s policies that have facilitated the entry of criminal aliens has also resulted in more innocent victims being permanently separated from their families and their children.
Record quantities of narcotics have also flooded into the United States. How many lives have been ruined or even lost to drug overdoses or to deaths that are directly or indirectly linked to drug use and the drug trade- causing more children to be permanently separated from their parents and other family members?
The question to which all American must demand an answer is simple- how much money should be paid by the jurisdictions that are responsible for their permanent separations of children from their parents because of Biden open borders/immigration anarchy policies that are exacerbated by the policies of “sanctuary jurisdictions’?
How much money should be paid to families who suffered the loss of their loved ones because of insane “no cash bail” policies that result in the release of sociopathic violent criminals who subsequently killed still more innocent victims?
CIS Director of Research Steven Camarota now writes that the cost to taxpayers will be even more because the roughly 500,000 to 600,000 illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior this year would be eligible to receive $800 million in cash payments as a result of the tax credits.
In an October analysis, we estimated that illegal immigrants would receive $8.2 billion in cash payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which is part of budget reconciliation bill, also referred to as the Build Back Better (BBB) Act. That analysis assumed cash payments would be limited to illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children, as is the case with the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC) it replaces. But the current version of the BBB Act repeals p. 1,452, line 14, the requirement that children claimed as dependents need Social Security numbers (SSNs). As a result, illegal immigrants whose children are illegal immigrants as well will receive an estimated $1.5 billion in payments from the new program. [Emphasis added]
The elimination of the SSN requirement also allows the more than 600,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the border in family units or as unaccompanied minors and released in FY 2021 to receive cash payments from the new CTC. We roughly estimate these new arrivals will receive slightly less than $800 million from the program, for a total of $10.5 billion in cash payments to illegal immigrants here in 2020 or released into the country in FY 2021. Receipt of payments under the new CTC is made all the easier because the BBB eliminates the work requirement of the old ACTC. [Emphasis added]
Report: GOP Insiders Will Seek to Demote Pro-Amnesty Rep. John Katko
Top GOP legislators are facing pressure from fellow Republicans to remove establishment Rep. John Katko from the top GOP slot in the House’s Homeland Security Committee, according to Punchbowl News.
The GOP leadership is bracing for rank-and-file lawmakers to attempt to strip committee assignments from the 13 Republican lawmakers who voted for the 1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Several of these lawmakers are also ranking members — top Republicans on committees — and these could be at risk, too.
[…]
Much of the anger is directed at John Katko (R-NY), who voted early for the legislation. Katko is the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee. Katko told multiple lawmakers on House floor that he had seen Rep Jim Banks (R-Ind) on television talking about the infrastructure bill, and he was voted early
Katko plays a central role in the GOP’s internal politics over migration policy — and his critics do not think he will try to win the external electoral battle over migration.
“Katko is unfit to serve in an immigration leadership position with his track record of being bought and paid for by corporate donors and his implicit support of amnesty,” a source told Breitbart News. “Having Katko as chairman is no different than if Democrats were still in charge of the committee,” the source added.
Katko arrived in 2015, and became the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee in December 2020.
That ranking membership helped him get the chairmanship of the American Security Task Force which was created to craft a winning immigration message for the 2022 election. That is a critical and difficult job, in part, because Democrats will try to sway swing-voters from listening to GOP’s criticism of Democrats’ border policies.
House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) confers with Rep. John Katko (R-NY) during a news conference with House Republicans about U.S.-Mexico border policy outside the U.S. Capitol on March 11, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Katko’s political circumstances make that task very difficult.
Democrats have the power to reshape Katko’s blue-leaning district to favor a formal Democratic takeover. “Democrats fully control the congressional redistricting process,” according to fivethirtyeight.com. “If the [pending] Democratic map is adopted, it could force Katko, R-Camillus, to run against Tenney, R-New Hartford, in a Republican primary election next year,” Syracuse.com reported in September.
However, Democrats are offering to negotiate, the Syracuse.com noted:
The commission’s chairman, David Imamura, said the draft maps should be viewed as the beginning of a conversation. “They are simply first drafts,” Imamura said. “I will be the first to say that these plans are imperfect, and that based on public input they can, should, and will change.”
Katko is also facing pressure from deep-pocketed business groups who can help or hurt his chances of surviving the redistricting process. For example, in March, business-backed pro-amnesty groups help to spend $200,000 on a pro-migration campaign in Katko’s district. In 2020, he fended off a Democratic challenger with the help of $1.46 million in campaign ads from the Congressional Leadership Fund, an investor funded, pro-migration group that supports pro-migration candidates.
In March, Katko showed his cards when he joined 29 GOP legislators to vote for a Democrat-run farmworker amnesty.
The amnesty would push many American farmworkers out of jobs, push billions of dollars of payroll from rural towns to foreign countries, slash investment in wealth-creating farm machinery, divert wealth from farm states to coastal investors, and create another pipeline of immigrant voters for the Democratic Party.
Katko’s office declined to answer questions from Breitbart.
As Katko struggles to survive 2022, Democrats are defending him. On November 9, for example, President Joe Biden told a Democratic meeting:
You know, the Republicans who voted in the House of Representatives for the infrastructure bill — you’ve seen in the press the reports that the other Republicans are trying to strip them of their standing in their Congress. If they’re a chairman of a committee, they’re trying to strip them of that chairmanship. I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s got to stop for the sake of America. ….[They] are now being threatened with their chairmanships. It’s just not right. We’re going to change it though.
Amid these contradictory pressures, Katko has minimized the GOP’s campaign promises on immigration, despite his chairmanship of the caucus’ campaign-themed American Security Task Force.
“From finishing the border wall system to modernizing technology and bolstering border staffing, this legislation tackles key shortcomings and weaknesses,” Katko said in a statement.
“That’s all there is to it?” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who noted the bill does not include any language to close up legal loopholes in the border, such as catch-and-release rules:
“It is pretty weak. I’m not against it, but it will not address the border crisis. The border crisis is primarily driven by loopholes in the law that everybody is aware of, not by a lack of equipment or personnel. I don’t dispute there almost certainly are personnel and equipment needs, but that’s not the main problem here.”
“The pocketbook issues on immigration is what delivers voters, and if any any member of the Republican party that wants to stay quiet on that front to not upset their corporate donors, they are sending a clear signal that they care more about the donor class than they do their actual constituents,” one Katko critic said.
For example, as voters grow more alarmed at Biden’s record-breaking inflow of job-seeking migrants, Katko touted the psychologically distant threat of terrorists crossing the southern border.
In late October, for example, he warned about terrorists walking through the southern border: “We know a number of terrorists have been caught at the border … We’re not allowed to disclose [the number] publicly.”
In hearings, Katko has also been solicitous of the Biden’s border chief. Alejandro Mayorkas. In a June 17 hearing, for example, he avoided asking about Mayorkas’ bureaucratic maneuvers to admit more economic migrants, and instead asked:
If [diversity] is one of your core values and one of your core priorities — diversity — why is isn’t there any funding for it in the budget? … Do you believe [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] should be up to about a $5 billion agency in the not too distant future? … Is it correct that there’s not additional Border Patrol agents scheduled [to be hired] in this budget request? … Do you ever go to a crime scene so you can get your head to see what happened with the crime so [suspects] could then be prosecuted?
Katko’s passivity comes as the Democrats threaten the GOP with a draft reconciliation bill that includes a mass amnesty and a rapid increase in migration. That bill would also deeply damage American graduates, force up housing prices nationwide, and also divert investment, jobs and wealth away from the GOP’s heartland states towards the Democrats’ big coastal states.
Democrats also made history by beginning the process to pass a separate multi-trillion dollar spending [reconciliation] package. With this vote tonight, Democrats have paved the way to pass a far-left wish list that will raise taxes, implement radical Green New Deal policies, make our economy less competitive, and exacerbate the skyrocketing inflation that is already hurting Central New York families.
The result of Katko’s low-profile stance is that only 48 percent of Americans think the GOP would do a better job on border security than the Democrats, according to an October poll of 1,000 Americans by NBC. Twelve percent of voters say the two parties are similar, and 17 percent says that neither party can do the job, according to the NBC data. The Democrats’ border policies are rated favorably by just 21 percent.
The polling failure comes even though Biden’s Democrats have opened the southern border to roughly 1 million illegal migrants in 2021 — and show little intention of reducing the inflow in 2022.
The GOP only gets a 48 percent score even though Harvard Harris reported that 71 percent of 1,578 registered voters want the migrants to be turned back to Mexico.
In October, GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy stepped in offer a stronger message: “We’ll return to the policies that made our border secure,” he told a press conference.
In September, McCarthy’s office spotlighted a speech by Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM). “We stand for our workers. We stand for law enforcement. We stand for safe communities. We stand for borders. We stand for America,” Herrell said.
This stronger pitch is a step towards the policy pushed by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). He posted a policy memo on April 14 which urged Republicans to defend working Americans from the government’s extraction-migration policies;
We believe U.S. immigration policy should be designed to primarily serve the interest of American citizens, families, and workers … Immigration policy should prioritize American workers, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents.
In November, the House GOP’s campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, edged towards a populist economic pitch on migration. Breitbart News reported on November 9;
The House GOP’s 2022 campaign committee has acknowledged that a clear majority of Americans oppose uncapped legal migration and hiring of foreign workers by U.S. corporations.
Fifty-three percent of voters, and 55 percent of independents, oppose “removing federal limits on the number of foreign workers who can be hired by corporations to do jobs based in the United States,” said a summary of a November 2-4 poll of 800 likely voters by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
“Well, the immigration issue is a pocketbook issue,” NRCC chairman Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) told Breitbart News on November 7. Emmer continued:
You’re talking about immigration being a kitchen table issue and how it impacts [voters]. The bottom line is that polling showed us this is still a very potent issue for Americans. This is something that, while some people would want to write it off, this is something that Americans care about, and this administration has completely punted on the immigration issue — and talk about incompetence!
Surveys show that a pocketbook message on immigration can win support from Democratic voters.
Rep. John Katko (R-NY) walks through the Canon Tunnel to the U.S. Capitol on January 12, 2021 in Washington, DC, as the House of Representatives plans to vote on Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, removing President Trump from office. (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images)
For example, roughly one-in-six of Biden’s 2020 voters say they strongly agree that illegal migration will drive up their housing prices, cut their wages, or take their jobs, according to an extensive survey sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Democrat-leaning Center for Politics.
The survey spotlighted “Concerned Moms,” a broad group of Democratic-leaning swing voters who “are worried about higher housing costs, taxes, and potential negative employment effects due to immigration.”
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act,” a filibuster-proof $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation package, would give $800 million worth of cash payments to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who were recently released into the United States interior, a new analysis states.
As Breitbart News previously reported, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) analyzed the cost to American taxpayers if Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit for illegal aliens was extended for at least another year as part of the reconciliation package.
Initially, the CIS analysis found that the cost to provide the tax credits to illegal aliens with children would cost about $80 billion over the course of a decade, or about $8 billion every year.
CIS Director of Research Steven Camarota now writes that the cost to taxpayers will be even more because the roughly 500,000 to 600,000 illegal aliens released into the U.S. interior this year would be eligible to receive $800 million in cash payments as a result of the tax credits.
In an October analysis, we estimated that illegal immigrants would receive $8.2 billion in cash payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which is part of budget reconciliation bill, also referred to as the Build Back Better (BBB) Act. That analysis assumed cash payments would be limited to illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children, as is the case with the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC) it replaces. But the current version of the BBB Act repeals p. 1,452, line 14, the requirement that children claimed as dependents need Social Security numbers (SSNs). As a result, illegal immigrants whose children are illegal immigrants as well will receive an estimated $1.5 billion in payments from the new program. [Emphasis added]
The elimination of the SSN requirement also allows the more than 600,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the border in family units or as unaccompanied minors and released in FY 2021 to receive cash payments from the new CTC. We roughly estimate these new arrivals will receive slightly less than $800 million from the program, for a total of $10.5 billion in cash payments to illegal immigrants here in 2020 or released into the country in FY 2021. Receipt of payments under the new CTC is made all the easier because the BBB eliminates the work requirement of the old ACTC. [Emphasis added]
Camarota estimates that nearly 8-in-10 illegal alien families in the U.S. “have incomes low enough to receive cash from” the tax credits, securing an average payment of $5,300 per family or $2,600 per child.
Democrats and Biden are pushing the plan despite opposition from most Americans. A recent Morning Consult survey found that 52 percent of registered U.S. voters are opposed to making the tax credits permanent. Likewise, a survey from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) found that 2-in-3 voters are opposed to the tax credits when they are told the amount of money it will provide to illegal aliens.
Already, the most recent research estimates that illegal immigration to the U.S. costs American taxpayers about $134 billion annually. The research suggests that each illegal alien costs taxpayers about $9,300 every year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Republicans Voted for Biden’s Infrastructure Bill After Securing Cash from Chamber of Commerce
Patrick Semansky/Jonahthan Newton/AFP/Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
A total of 32 House and Senate Republicans helped push President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package over the finish line, most of whom have been showered with campaign cash from the leading lobbying group behind the bill — the United States Chamber of Commerce.
The story is a fixture of Washington, D.C.’s swamp culture.
Elected lawmakers run for office, grabbing donations from special interest groups, then, after their election, voting for legislation supported by those special interest groups despite their constituents’ opposition.
In the case of Biden’s infrastructure bill, the Chamber had been lobbying for the measure since the start of the year. By July, Open Secrets reported that the Chamber had spent more than $12 million lobbying for the bill in the second quarter, alone. In the first quarter, the Chamber spent $17.5 million lobbying for the bill.
The Chamber’s intense lobbying focus proved successful when 13 House Republicans voted with Democrats last week to send the bill to Biden’s desk after 19 Senate Republicans, in August, helped pass the bill with Democrats.
The 32 House and Senate Republicans who voted for the bill are:
John Katko (R-NY)
Don Bacon (R-NE)
Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ)
Fred Upton (R-MI)
Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)
Don Young (R-AK)
Tom Reed (R-NY)
Chris Smith (R-NJ)
Andrew Garbarino (R-NY)
Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY)
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH)
David McKinley (R-WV)
Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Richard Burr (R-NC)
Deb Fischer (R-NE)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Rob Portman (R-OH)
Thom Tillis (R-NC)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Jim Risch (R-ID)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
John Hoeven (R-ND)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Mitt Romney (R-UT)
Campaign contributions reviewed by Breitbart News show that all but nine of the House and Senate Republicans took donations from the Chamber in their recent election and re-election bids.
Tillis, representing the swing state of North Carolina, received $15,000 from the Chamber’s official political action committee (PAC) in recent election cycles, the most of any of the lawmakers.
Sullivan, Blunt, Graham, Portman, McConnell, and Collins each have taken $10,000 from the U.S. Chamber PAC in recent election cycles from 2015 to this year. Cassidy, Capito, Burr, Fischer, Murkowski, and Risch have each received $5,000 from the PAC, while Grassley last received money, $1,500, from the PAC in 2016.
In the House, Katko, Bacon, Garbarino, Fitzpatrick, and Gonzalez each received $6,000 from the U.S. Chamber PAC between 2020 and this year. Upton and Reed each took $5,000 while Van Drew and Young each accepted $2,500 checks from the PAC.
Passage of the bill, through a coalition of corporate-friendly Republicans and nearly all Democrats, serves as the first test for the Chamber’s relationship with the GOP since it began endorsing Democrats in elections last year and has rebuked economic nationalism in favor of its globalist ideology that favors the multinational corporations it represents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment