July 8, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Biden’s Border Policies: Death and Destruction Guaranteed
By David Potter
It's no secret that President Biden has been dismantling the U.S. immigration system since he took office. Under his all-but-named open-border policies, an estimated 794,112 illegal immigrants have escaped into the United States. The crisis is accelerating as roughly 476,000 such crossings have been in the first six months of 2022.
The "successful" crossings at the U.S. border will continue to skyrocket, as more immigrants attempt to enter, with agents encountering a record 239,416 migrants in May alone.
What's even more alarming is that Biden is removing Trump-appointed immigration judges and immigration cases are being dismissed. Biden's Justice Department has come under fire from a former immigration judge who was fired by the administration. Matthew O'Brien appeared on Fox News Tuesday and accused the Biden administration of "packing" immigration courts in order to allow more immigrants to stay in the United States. O'Brien claimed that the courts were not designed to do this and that the administration's actions were undermining the rule of law.
As the number of immigrants arriving at the southern border continues to surge, officials in several Texas counties are calling on Governor Greg Abbott to take measures to address the problems. The officials, from Uvalde, Kinney, Goliad, and Terrell Counties, said that the situation was an "invasion" and called on Abbott to enforce federal immigration laws. The counties are in southwest Texas, near the border with Mexico. The Biden administration has clearly made the situation more dangerous for Americans as well as immigrants who are crossing.
This surge has resulted in a backlog of cases, leaving Border Patrol agents overwhelmed and unable to properly process and detain illegal aliens. In addition, Biden has ended many of Trump's border security policies, making it easier for smugglers to bring large groups of people across the border.
On Monday, a shocking discovery was made in San Antonio, Texas- a tractor-trailer filled with illegal aliens, parked in a sparsely developed area. The police were called after a worker at a nearby building reported hearing people crying out from inside the trailer. When they arrived, they found the doors of the trailer had been shut tight, and the illegals inside were dying from the heat. This tragedy now stands as the deadliest smuggling attempt in history, and it is a direct result of President Joe Biden's border security failures.
The Presidents of Mexico and Guatemala have expressed their own concerns. "It happens because there is trafficking of people and a lack of control, in this case at the Mexican-U.S. border, but also in the U.S. interior" said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The Biden administration's messaging on immigration has created "confusion" that human smugglers and traffickers have exploited, said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. Giammattei said smugglers know it's easier to get people into the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration as a family, and that smugglers have used children, whether biological or not, to get their clients across the border.
Potential terrorism and drugs are a significant challenge with Biden's policies. Border Patrol apprehended at least 23 people coming across the southern border whose names are on the terror watchlist in 2021. CBP seized 22 pounds of fentanyl earlier this month - two milligrams is enough to kill a person. 100,000 Americans died from overdoses last year, largely driven by Chinese fentanyl crossing the US-Mexico border. The Heritage Foundation says Biden's policies are "making devastation and death the norm at our southern border".
With an unprecedented humanitarian disaster and America's national security at risk, when will Biden do something? People are dying and the concept of national citizenship is eroding. A majority of Latinos support keeping Title 42. Only a President bent on altering the demographics of America- at any cost- would go this far.
David Potter is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government
Click here to view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/bidens-border-policies-death-and-destruction-guaranteed/
Video One from Restoring Freedom Series: How to Fire the DC Swamp
To view video: https://youtu.be/B4N7RDh46IQ or click on picture
Cartoon: Drain America Better
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/cartoon-drain-america-better/
Kristina Wong, Report: Republicans Plot ‘Vengeance’ on January 6th Committee
Republicans are plotting “vengeance” on the Democrats’ partisan January 6th committee, according to a recent report by Axios.
“Key House Republicans are threatening to subpoena records of the Jan. 6 committee if the GOP retakes the majority next year — an escalation of the party’s effort to undercut the investigation’s findings,” Axios reported on Wednesday.
“While Republicans have been eager to move beyond what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, many want to use a GOP-controlled majority to frame their own narrative of what happened that day — and also raise questions about the Jan. 6 committee’s work and spending,” the report said.
A senior GOP aide on the House Administration Committee told Axios: “When Republicans retake the majority, we will exercise our oversight responsibilities including subpoena authority to review all transcripts and information that the committee has access to in order to identify the truth.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN) has already requested documents from the Department of Homeland Security to investigate claims made by former White House aide and committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson, according to a report by the Federalist.
Hutchinson delivered sensationalized testimony at a hearing last week on June 28, claiming former President Donald Trump lunged at a steering wheel and a Secret Service agent in an attempt to join supporters protesting at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
However, establishment media outlets reported shortly thereafter that her alleged sources disputed her accounts and would be willing to deny her accounts under oath.
Hutchinson also claimed she spoke to then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone the morning of January 6th at the White House and that he had told her to make sure Trump did not go to the Capitol. However, Cipollone was not at the White House that morning, according to the Federalist.
“Every Trump White House senior staff member knows that Cipollone was not at the White House that morning so that conversation could not have taken place,” a source told The Federalist. “In Cipollone’s absence, Pat Philbin was filling in for Pat [Cipollone] that morning.”
Banks fired off a letter on July 1 to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting White House surveillance logs and video to verify which senior staff were at the White House during the times referenced by Hutchinson.
Banks also sent a letter to Cipollone — who is now scheduled to testify in front of the committee on Friday — asking him what time he was at the White House on January 6, 2021.
He gave both men until the end of this week to reply.
House Republicans are planning a number of different investigations if they retake the House in November, which is widely expected.
“The base is out for blood on subpoenas,” a House GOP aide told Axios. “A lot of it will just depend on how far McCarthy wants to go.”
To view online: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/06/report-republicans-plot-vengeance-on-january-6th-committee/
David Blackmon: EPA Targets Permian Basin, Widening Biden’s War On Oil And Gas
During an interview with Brazil’s Agencia Estadio news service this week, I told the reporter that one of the reasons why I characterized the Biden energy policies as “confused” in a recent story is because we so often see the President saying one thing in public as his appointees in the federal bureaucracy are doing the opposite. We have seen this phenomenon take place repeatedly this year, as Mr. Biden has frequently called for the domestic industry to produce more oil and gas, refine more gasoline and ramp up exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe, while his agencies continue to hold up permitting, issue restrictive new regulations, and issue rulings that directly inhibit companies’ ability to get their business done.
It happened again this week, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it may soon issue a ruling declaring that vast parts of the Permian Basin are in “non-attainment” status under the agency’s ozone regulations. If such a declaration is made, it will constitute a direct governmental assault on what is by far America’s most active and productive oil-producing region and its second most-productive natural gas area. The Permian currently accounts for fully 43% of total U.S. daily oil production and is home to almost 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs according to the Enverus daily rig count.
Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in the West Virginia v. EPA case is not expected to impact the agency’s ability to set standards on ozone levels and enforce them. If anything, it seems likely the agency, at least under a Biden presidency, will seek to become more aggressive in this realm as a backdoor means of continuing to force coal-fired power plants out of business and, as in this case, hamper the domestic oil and gas industry.
Placing the Permian Basin in non-attainment status would force a significant reduction in the region’s rig count, severely limiting the domestic industry’s efforts to increase U.S. oil production at a time when the global oil market is already severely under-supplied. Thus, while the President claims to want to “work like the devil” to lower gasoline prices and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm claims Mr. Biden is “using every tool” at his disposal to do so, the EPA is working to create the exact opposite impact.
The EPA’s announcement comes just a week after Secretary Granholm summoned a group of refining company CEOs to Washington, D.C. where she urged them to somehow increase their refining efforts, despite the fact that her own Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that the industry is already running at a historically high 95% capacity. It also comes after both Granholm and the President himself have repeatedly called for the domestic industry to increase production levels of oil and gas to try to mitigate high prices for gasoline and diesel at the pump.
So, which is official administration policy? Does President Biden want more oil production and more gasoline to be refined from it, or are the actions by his agencies, now directly targeting the nation’s most prolific oil-producing region, his real goal?
To Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the answer seems obvious. “The EPA’s process could interfere in the production of oil in Texas which could lead to skyrocketing prices at the pump by reducing production, increase the cost of that production, or do both,” The Governor wrote Biden this week. “Your administration’s announced action is completely discretionary. Thus, you have the power to stop it.”
Governor Abbott is correct to point out that the President has the power to rein his regulators in, but, as the Wall Street Journal points out, Mr. Biden appointed Joe Goffman, another of the many anti-fossil fuel activists that now hold senior posts at his various agencies, to head up EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation on an acting basis. That appointment might have been made with this specific policy action in mind.
So, here we have a crystal clear example of a “tool” that Mr. Biden has available to him to positively impact consumer costs on gasoline. All he has to do is issue an order instructing Mr. Goffman and the EPA to stand down. The clear history of this presidency indicates no one should hold their breath waiting for that to happen.
This is the Biden Green New Deal plan, and high prices at the pump are a fundamental piece of it.
To view online: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2022/07/01/epa-targets-permian-basin-widening-bidens-war-on-oil-and-gas/?sh=13a464ce1b89