House Democrats are rallying around the four far-left congresswomen who have collectively become known as the “squad.” The House Democrat majority has put aside legislative business to debate a resolution condemning President Trump for his allegedly “racist” tweets denouncing Reps. Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), nicknamed AOC, and Ilhan Omar (Minn.). Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who just last week was on the receiving end of the race card played so often by the squad, is now referring to these hate-mongers as “our sisters.” As President Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, “now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party.”
Speaker Pelosi got so carried away defending her “sisters” and condemning the president’s tweets as “racist” that she broke House protocol and sparked a floor fight. Her fellow Democrats saved her from a ruling that would have barred her from speaking the rest of the day. They also kept her “racist” reference to the president’s tweets in the record. The final resolution, entitled “H. Res. 489 — Condemning President Trump’s racist comments directed at Members of Congress,” passed along largely partisan lines by a vote of 240-187. All Democrats voted yes, along with only four Republicans.
The resolution begins by mythologizing the supposed unalloyed embrace of immigration by the founding fathers, citing Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison as examples. In truth, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison all expressed reservations about opening the door too widely to foreigners. The resolution then cherry picks pro-immigration quotes by past presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, without acknowledging the limitations they sought to impose on immigrant entry into this country. On FDR’s watch, the U.S. government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, claiming they were a potential security risk. Ronald Reagan did sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided immigrants who had entered the country illegally the opportunity to apply for legal residence if they met certain conditions. However, the law also contained provisions intended to deter future illegal entry, including criminal penalties to be imposed against anyone who “conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection” illegal aliens. The Trump administration has tried to enforce these provisions.
After the resolution’s build-up of the virtues of an open-door immigration policy, without acknowledging the challenges that even Barack Obama, the deporter in chief, recognized, the resolution proceeds to demonize President Trump with a series of gross distortions. The resolution falsely charges that “President Donald Trump’s racist comments have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.” It twists the president’s actual words to caricature him as an unredeemable nativist bigot who detests all people of color and thinks that, according to the resolution, “our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should ‘go back’ to other countries.”
President Trump was addressing only the four radicals who he correctly believes want to drastically transform for the worse the political, economic and legal systems of this country. He took them to task for their rhetoric constantly denigrating America and blaming it for the world’s ills. As for his views on immigration, the president said during his last State of Union address that he wants “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” He added, “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways.” These are not the words of a bigoted nativist. Rather, they are the words of a president sworn to faithfully execute the nation’s laws, including its immigration laws.
By turning the resolution into a victim versus oppressor narrative on behalf of their “sisters,” the Democrats are letting the four radical squad leaders off the hook for their own hateful conduct. They should be held to account, as President Trump has tried to do, for fueling racial division, anti-Semitism, contempt for the rule of law in America, and incitement of hatred against immigration law enforcement agents that has put their lives in danger. The Democrats, on the other hand, are gutless in the face of real bigotry in their own ranks. Speaker Pelosi showed her cowardice, for example, by agreeing several months ago to water down a resolution intended originally to specifically condemn anti-Semitism in response to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tropes.
The Democrat-controlled House has another chance if it wants to pass a useful resolution. It could focus its ire on the terrorist acts of violence committed by members of Antifa, instead of playing spiteful partisan games. One such act of domestic terror was the firebombing of an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington last weekend by an Antifa member who used AOC’s “concentration camps” canard in his manifesto. Another resulted in the brutal beating of a journalist,
Andy Ngo, whose parents came to this country from Vietnam by boat in 1978. Antifa, which claims to be fighting fascism, is in fact a fascist organization that glorifies violence against anyone or any institution it believes deserves to be punished. “Wake up wake up, it’s not too late. Burn down the masters house,” Chicago Antifa tweeted on July 13th.
Nancy Pelosi herself has condemned Antifa violence in the past. Back in 2017, following the outbreak of violence at Berkeley, she said, “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa [sic] in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.” All to no avail. Antifa has not gotten the message. The violence continues. Now, the Democrat leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, are looking the other way.
When asked by reporters whether they were willing to denounce the Antifa member’s attack on the Tacoma, Washington immigration detention center, AOC and Omar declined to answer. At the same time, AOC has no problem vilifying Republicans who choose not to condemn President Trump for his tweets against the squad.
“Until Republican officials denounce yesterday’s explicitly racist statements (which should be easy!), we sadly have no choice but to assume they condone it,” AOC tweeted. “It is extremely disturbing that the *entire* GOP caucus is silent. Is this their agenda?”
What’s your agenda, AOC? Allowing violence against an immigration detention facility you believe is akin to a “concentration camp” to become an acceptable form of “resistance”? Apparently so.
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