Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to kill the GOP's own border security bill on Monday evening, just three hours after coming out with emphatic support for it.
McConnell spoke to the press in support, but when speaking to his caucus, he caved in to pressure from the MAGA wing of the GOP to stop the bill, so Joe Biden wouldn't have a "win" on the issue. It's the closest the Senate has come to an actual deal on immigration in nearly two decades.
Speaking to Ali Velshi on MSNBC, host Joy Reid said that Democrats could agree to build a 60-foot wall that dives into the Rio Grande and copy Donald Trump's own policy and Republicans would refuse to support it.
"We get that's what they're doing," she said. "What it could portend if you had a Democratic Party that was coherent in the way it communicated with America, there would be an ad on television in every swing state plus Texas every day saying, 'It's been X number of days since Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate to pass the strongest security bill at the border that we've ever seen.' [Then] delineate what's in it and say this congressman won't pass it, that congressman won't pass it, that congressman won't pass it."
She warned that the GOP might actually be harming their own re-elections with the move.
"Because if Democrats — and I don't know if the Democratic Party is that coherent or cohesive in terms of being able to message," Reid prefaced. "But if they were facing a Democratic Party that could do that, they would get buried. Every single negative incident that happened at the border would be an ad. Every single person who somehow broke away through immigration and committed a crime would be an ad. They're so lucky that they face a Democratic Party that is focused on governing and not messaging."
For over a generation, Democrats have been ridiculed for being so disorganized that even humorist and actor Will Rogers once famously quipped, "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Bulwark founder and chief Charlie Sykes was shocked that Republicans were so willing to sound the alarm on what a huge national security threat the border is, but they're not willing to do anything to solve the problem.
"Here you have the Republicans, who have been saying for months, as you point out in their stump speech, that this is an imminent existential threat, this is a threat to national security, and your children are dying as a result of this," Sykes said with hyperbole. "When they are handed on a platter what they have defined as the solution, they say no. I think sometimes I feel like I'm too cynical about politics. What is extraordinary about this is how transparent the cynicism is, how naked the cynicism is. And again, you're hearing this not from Democrats but from very conservative Republican senators like James Lankford."
See her full comments in the video below or at the link here.
How Democrats can use Republicans' own border security failure against them: Joy Ann Reidyoutu.be
