Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele blasted South Carolina Senator Tim Scott‘s “performative visit” to the border as another stunt, urging Scott to turn his chauffeured vehicle around and get back to work in Washington, D.C. — where any real fixes to the border crisis must start.
“Oh for heaven’s sake stop with the performative ‘visits’!” Steele wrote to Scott. “The Senate had a bipartisan border bill and you rejected it because Trump told you to.”
Oh for heaven’s sake stop with the performative “visits”! The Senate had a bipartisan border bill and you rejected it because Trump told you to. Turn the car around, head to the Capitol and introduce a border bill to fix the problem because you already know what it is. https://t.co/qQltxQcSzJ
— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) February 16, 2024
“Turn the car around, head to the Capitol and introduce a border bill to fix the problem because you already know what it is,” Steele instructs the Senator.
It’s advice likely to go unheeded, because Scott — as Steele asserts — is part of the MAGA contingent that has been accused, even by Republicans, of wanting the border crisis to remain unsolved for use as a campaign issue for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
[Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), one of the negotiators of the Senate bill Steele references, said he was told by those who had “political differences” with the bill that it was “the wrong time to solve the problem.”]
Steele’s accusation — that Scott is doing Trump’s bidding — would seem to be confirmed by the content of Scott’s video, in which the Senator overtly uses his trip to the border to campaign for Trump.
Scott’s rhetoric focuses on blaming Joe Biden exclusively for the border crisis — it is “brought to you by Joe Biden,” the Senator says — and proceeds to praise what he says were only a thousand border crossings a day “under President Trump.”
Scott then asserts that the increase in crossings under Biden is an attempt by Democrats to “get new voters” who won’t want to, as he does, “fire Joe Biden.”
Scott’s claim that Democrats are permitting illegal immigration in order to grow a new voting base has little evidentiary support, but it fits snugly with popular right wing narratives, as Scott knows well. The notion that undocumented migrants crossing today are going to impact the 2024 election by voting in it has no merit. (The only election impact the migrants are likely to have is as a wedge issue, not as voters.)