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John:
Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
That sad trombone sound you’re hearing is the House GOP majority failing by a vote of 202 to 220 to pass a 6-month Continuing Resolution which was paired with the SAVE Act (requiring proof of citizenship before registering to vote). On Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the House would vote this week on a “bare bones” 3-month Continuing Resolution to December 20.
Absent a commitment from House GOP leadership to the contrary, this will tee up that old Washington chestnut: a CR which expires within days of the Christmas break, pressuring holdouts in Congress to pass a bloated omnibus spending bill, text of which will be released a single day – or, more likely, hours – before the vote. And in this case, that bill will have been written by Senate Democrats and will heavily favor extending Democrat policies into the next year, tying the hands of the next occupant of the White House until the end of 2025.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, because you have. It’s literally the same playbook that is executed in Washington at the end of every fiscal year, decade over decade. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Spending fights do matter, however, and not just for the topline number. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, an omnibus bill will fund Joe Biden’s immigration policies for the next year – and last week we got an inside look at just how insidious those policies are.
According to testimony from retired Customs and Border Protection Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke, the Biden Department of Homeland Security ordered Border Patrol agents to conceal rising numbers of illegal immigrants with “significant ties to terrorism.” Per his testimony:
We had an exponential increase in significant interest aliens (SIA). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism. Prior to this administration, San Diego Sector averaged 10-15 SIA arrests per year. Once word was out that the border was far easier to cross, San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, well over that in 2023, and even more than that registered this year. These are only the ones we caught. I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border.
Heitke went on to describe policies from the White House which removed Border Patrol’s ability to deter illegal crossings by reducing the number of countries to which migrants could be returned, and significantly reducing the amount of available detention space. This left agents with no choice but to release the migrants they apprehended. He also commented on the “pressure from the administration” to portray a “fiction” rather than dealing with the reality, even noting that when “2,000 or more aliens [were] sitting in between the fences asking to turn themselves in,” he was “told to move them out of sight of the media.”
Border Patrol, he noted, has been “continually forgotten and neglected by the media and this administration,” He described the horrible conditions and abuse migrants have to suffer on the way to the border that are then presented to an underresourced Border Patrol, and linked the rising suicides in the Border Patrol to the migrant surge. In response to questioning from Rep. Mark Green, Heitke testified that he believed the administration’s efforts to incentivize illegal immigration were “purposeful.”
The Latest From Around The Conservative Movement
One More Thing…
If you missed it, the American Accountability Foundation has looked into the questions and accusations regarding the safety of pets in Springfield, Ohio. Here’s what they found.
And the Immigration Accountability Project’s Rosemary Jenks testified about non-citizen voting before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government. Read her testimony and watch the hearing here.
Sincerely,
Rachel Bovard
Vice President of Programs
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