Lamar Alexander Embraces Amnesty Again after Primary Win

It didn’t take long for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) to embrace amnesty again. 

As soon as he won his Senate primary election against conservative Joe Carr, Alexander said it was “embarrassing” that Republicans have not yet passed a bill. 

Never mind that Alexander spent nearly his entire primary campaign trying to convince voters that he was against “amnesty” and would never dare to embrace it before the primary election.

“I don’t know how it will affect our politics in the near term,” Alexander told Politico of a comprehensive immigration bill. “I think it’s embarrassing for us not to deal with the problem, and I think we should do it in the next two years.”

And though Alexander claimed that he won the primary because he did not run away from his record, he aired a deceptive ad in the final week of the campaign that claimed he “voted to end amnesty.”

“Last year, I voted to end amnesty,” Alexander claimed in his closing campaign ad, despite his vote for the Senate’s amnesty bill.

As Breitbart News reported, “Even after law enforcement officials warned him that the Senate’s ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty bill would worsen the border crisis, Alexander voted for … the Senate bill [that] provided a pathway to citizenship for nearly all of the country’s illegal immigrants.” 

Alexander also claimed in the ad that he “voted against President Obama’s immigration bill” before the recess.

But as Breitbart News also reported, “When Alexander had a chance to help Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) kill the Senate’s border bill, he was absent, which means he neither voted for nor against it.”

After Carr made Alexander’s vote for the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill the focal point of his campaign, Alexander failed to receive a majority of the vote on primary night. In fact, Alexander’s showing was “by far the lowest winning percentage and margin of victory ever recorded in a primary for a Republican U.S. Senator” from Tennessee, according to a University of Minnesota analysis.