117th Congress

When Donald Trump left office, we had restored operational control of our southern border. The wall was nearing completion. Court ordered deportations were finally being enforced. The Migrant Protection Protocols negotiated with Mexico had reduced the number of fraudulent asylum claims to a trickle. All that Biden needed to do was to continue these policies. Instead, he reversed them on his first day in office. He ordered the border wall to be abandoned, leaving construction gaps that make it useless. He ordered ICE to cease enforcing the law. He ended Trump‘s remain-in-Mexico policy. And he sent a clear and unmistakable message heard around the world: America is now a nation without borders.

As the tensions of civil war reached a boiling point, President Lincoln vainly reached out to Democrats with these words: “We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.” The contrast with Mr. Biden’s September 1st speech in Philadelphia is jarring.  In it and many remarks since, Mr. Biden clearly addresses the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump as enemies who – quote – “threaten the very foundation of our Republic.”  He condemned us as “extremists” who “do not respect the constitution” who “do not believe in the rule of law,” and who “refuse to accept the results of a free election.”  In other forums, he has called us “semi-fascists.” Mr. President, we revere our Constitution and the structure of individual liberty it was designed to protect.  We do not understand how a government established under that Constitution could use the FBI to pressure social media platforms to censor and suppress free speech, or to intimidate parents concerned about their school boards with threat tags, or to instruct its field offices to regard anyone who displays our founding American flags as a political extremist.