Where’s Joe? Migration Talks Stall Without Biden

GOP legislators want President Joe Biden to help negotiate a bipartisan $111 billion emergency bill that would end his open-borders policy — but Democratic legislators want to shut him out of the top-level talks.

“It’s not going to be easy,” GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters on Tuesday, adding:

We’ve got plenty of work to do in January. And If it were possible to pass this sooner, I’d be for that. But we can’t do that without full engagement from the White House, and ultimately the person who can sign something into law.

“We certainly demand that the President does get involved,” House Speaker Mike Johnston (R-LA) told radio host Hugh Hewitt. ‘”The buck stops at his desk, and this is far, far overdue,” he said on December 12.

“We’ve got to get a different mix to overcome some of these hurdles with the administration,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), of the GOP negotiators, told the U.K.’s Independent pro-migration newspaper.

EXCLUSIVE: 1,500 Migrants Cross Border into Texas in Six Hours

In contrast, younger Democratic legislators, agency officials, and staffers want to keep Biden, aged 81, out of the talks, even though he will be required by any deal to enforce the deal on his many open-border deputies, including Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security chief.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) told Fox News:

We’ve got the right people in the room, the President’s team, the Sec[retary] of Homeland Security in the room. So we had a really good representative group, a group that can they can land this deal if everybody’s ready to close.

Murphy has been one of the Democratic Senators in the negotiations where Democrats and Republicans are using Ukraine’s need for war funds as leverage in their domestic fight over partisan migration policies.

Politico reported:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that … negotiating senators would meet on Tuesday afternoon with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as well as aides to Schumer, McConnell and the White House … Mayorkas declined to comment on negotiations or on whether they will meet again.

Biden’s prepared statements do not suggest he wants to get involved or roll back his easy-migration policy that has invited at least 6 million foreigners into Americans’ workplaces, communities, and schools.

“My team is working with Senate Democrats and Republicans to try to find a bipartisan compromise,” Biden said as he read his statement during a Tuesday press event.

But at least one Democrat has suggested Biden get involved in the talks. “If they are not successful, then I would urge the president to get more directly involved,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DEL) told Politico.

For now, Democrats are only offering cosmetic policy changes and migrant-magnet spending plans to the GOP in the talks.

For example, they have offered a policy change to detain all migrants until their asylum claims. But that detention is already required by law, is ignored by Mayorkas and his deputies, and is underfunded by Democratic legislators.

Related: Illegal Immigrants’ Ladder Found at Southern Border REMOVED

Democrats are also offering to revive the Title 42 border rejection law. But Mayorkas — a pro-migration zealot — does not want to use the law or even negotiate vital deportation deals with the migrants’ home countries.

On Thursday, December 7, all GOP Senators blocked the Democrats’ push for a $14 billion “magnet” bill that would expand and conceal illegal economic migration into Americans’ communities. They voted against the migration bill even though Democrats had combined it with two bills that most Republicans want to pass — a $61 billion plan to fund Ukraine’s war with Russia and a $14 billion check to aid Israel’s war against the Hamas.

On Tuesday, Biden and the Democrats upped the pressure on the GOP by inviting Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to D.C. to plead for the aid money.

But GOP Senators do not seem to be budging under pressure from Democrats and their allies in the establishment media. “The most important thing that happened in there is [Sen.] Chuck Schumer heard, and President Zelenskyy heard, there’s not going to be a national security bill unless the border is included,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Tuesday.

Barrasso is one of the leading candidates to replace McConnell after he retires.

GOP Senators are describing their rejection of Biden’s migration plan as an effort to improve Americans’ national security.

“There are four national security issues – Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel, and the [U.S.] border,” Johnson told Hewitt. “As far as I can tell, there’s agreement on three of them, but the fourth, there isn’t … we’re not getting any cooperation from the White House and the Senate Democrats at all,” he said.

EXCLUSIVE: Large Group of Migrants from Many Nations Cross Border into Arizona

“The focus is — [and] what you hear from so many people — is: Why would we deal with other peoples’ national security and ignore American national security?” Sen, James Lankford (R-OK), one of the GOP negotiators, told CBS on December 10.

He continued:

Why would we literally allow people across our southern border — [whom] this administration labels national security risks — by the thousands coming into the country? Separate from just the migrants that are coming here for employment … Why would we not work to be able to stop that? …

We can’t do everything on the border. But we can do the things to begin to control the border so that the United States is in control of our boundaries, not the cartels.

GOP legislators are also spotlighting the huge and growing taxpayer cost of Biden’s no-compromise war with Russia.

“We’ve also been told in previous briefings that they might need another $100 billion next year,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mont). “I just don’t know how you go back home and explain that to people when again, they’re paying more every time they go to the grocery store.”