“You know and I know it’s the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen,” Biden said. “So instead of playing politics with the issue, why don’t we just get together and get it done?”
Biden touted the bipartisan border bill as “a win for the American people,” calling it a “truly bipartisan initiative.” He called on the Senate to reconsider the bill, asking senators to “set politics aside” and for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to put the bill on the floor.
“We need to act,” Biden said, adding that Republicans in Congress needed to “show a little spine.”
It moves the discussion further to the right and legitimizes Republican talking points for the majority of people who will only hear a brief soundbite about this, rather than diving deep into the matter.
Besides, the GOP isn’t about to run out of bogeymen to trot out just because they could get what they want on the border. They can take it as a compromise and try to push things further down the line. Or they can decide this is good enough for now, and start railing against something else. Union membership rising being a Chinese plot to infiltrate the US and install a Communist dictatorship, so we better write some new laws to enable even more union busting. Free school lunches for kids from poor families turning them gay AND communist by getting them hooked on the government teat early. Woke public libraries turning kids trans by letting them check out books that don’t universally demonize it, so better put some sort of draconian funding limits on them. They’ll find something else, don’t worry.
The way you’re framing it and Congressional Democrats approach these things only work if the Republicans aren’t completely shameless, above doing things that should completely destroy any remaining vestiges for their voters, but this has been disproven time and time again by the actions of the GOP. If they think they’ll have half a chance, they’ll wring out even more concessions on this front from the Democrats by pretending to offer something they immediately renege on, just to leave the Democrats going “Aw, shucks, fooled me again. I thought you said you weren’t going to do this again.”