Four Republicans feature in a new compilation video released by the Biden-Harris campaign, with each GOP lawmaker claiming a responsibility to ensure Americans’ safety by protecting the border — and each admitting that responsibility hasn’t been lived up to.
It’s a failed promise that the Biden administration itself admits to in a press release yesterday pushing Congress to reconsider the languishing Senate bipartisan border bill, which the White House says will “secure the border and fix our broken immigration system.”
[NOTE: The Biden-Harris campaign continues to post as many videos of Republicans as Democrats, often posting Donald Trump himself in the belief that the presumptive nominee’s own words — especially in his more authoritarian or less lucid performances — are a help to Biden.]
Here is a compilation of Republicans pointing out that the border is not solved because Donald Trump killed the border deal pic.twitter.com/pJFYowlVMc
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 29, 2024
Among the four Republicans featured above, Mitt Romney — the Utah Senator and 2012 GOP presidential candidate — is the least surprising, as Romney has increasingly found himself at odds with the emergent MAGA wing of the Republican party and has considered casting a vote for Biden in November.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who negotiated the bipartisan Senate border bill that failed after the House promised to reject it, has also, like Romney, publicly called out Trump for dictating the GOP intransigence on the bill, which contains major border policy shifts including a total closing of the border when certain migrant levels have been exceeded.
[NOTE: Lankford has told his Senate colleagues he was threatened for trying to solve the border problem in this “election year,” implying that Trump prefers a status quo on border chaos as a campaign issue to run on.]
This backfired spectacularly.
FOX: Why give Biden this (win) in an election year?
Lankford then breaks down how the bill *would* solve a lot of the issues, and reminds the host that they all took an oath to the constitution, even in election years.
— Angry Staffer (@Angry_Staffer) January 28, 2024
Also featured are tell-it-like-it-is Texas Republican congressmen Chip Roy and Dan Crenshaw, the former Navy SEAL. Roy goes back to 2018 and knocks then-President Trump for signing numerous continuing resolutions despite pledging not to, and for caving on building the wall he’d promised. (Trump has said he finished the wall, which — if true — would mean the wall didn’t work.)
Crenshaw is so conservative that he has mocked the far-right Roy’s Freedom Caucus members as “performance artists” instead of legislators, and ratted them out for failing to vote with Trump as consistently as, say, Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the GOP pariah who tried to hold Trump accountable for January 6.
In the Biden-Harris compliation, Crenshaw talks duty over politics and says he is “extremely disappointed in the strange maneuvering by many on the right to torpedo a potential border reform bill.”
Crenshaw talks about responsibility and priorities and what elected officials owe their constituents. Notably, his full statement is edited by Biden-Harris in this video to emphasize Crenshaw’s disapproval of anything smacking of political posing instead of problem solving by his colleagues.
Crenshaw doesn’t need the Biden-Harris campaign’s video editor to make Republicans look bad, however. Below is Crenshaw in 2021 criticizing the Freedom Caucus for hypocrisy. It’s the kind of video the Biden-Harris campaign keeps surfacing to portray the opponent as radical and extreme — especially helpful, they believe, if the critique is coming from the Republican side.
Wowie! Dan Crenshaw trashes ‘Freedom Caucus’ members Greene, Brooks, Gohmert, Gosar, Jordan, etc, as “performance artists” while defending Kinzinger. “We have grifters in our midst .. lie after lie after lie.” pic.twitter.com/hoaGOcOx9s
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 7, 2021