David has his sights set on another Goliath.
After taking down then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary last year, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) is aiming to slay a border bill from House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)—a bill Brat says is a “Trojan Horse” for amnesty.
“A border security bill should do what its name suggests and this thing– the McCaul bill– still leaves enforcement in President Obama’s hands,” Brat said in a radio interview on The John Fredericks Show— a local Virginia radio program—on Thursday. “So is that where you want to leave authority? If you read through the bill, there’s no enforcement that really draws a stark line and does anything with folks crossing the border.”
Brat joins Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, in explaining that McCaul’s bill fails to secure the border.
Brat adds that McCaul’s measure is actually part of a bigger plan by some in the Republican Party who want to use it as a fig leaf that then allows them to push amnesty through Congress.
“It does not secure the border,” Brat said. “It leaves authority in the hands of President Obama on that issue. And just look at what President Obama has done with ObamaCare, etc. and he’s riding roughshod over the law. And we’re going to give $10 billion dollars to leave the authority in the hands of someone who already doesn’t want to enforce the border?”
“The most troubling aspect is this Trojan horse thing,” Brat added. “If you pass a bill called ‘border security,’ then the other side is going to say, ‘Hey, look, we already did it, we passed border security, so now it’s time for step two, which is amnesty– let everyone in, legalize them, because we now have a secure border.”
Brat has read the legislation—many members of Congress don’t read bills before voting on them either way—and specifically points out holes in the language that allow President Obama to continue his open borders immigration policy.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Brat said.
It’s got stuff like this in it: If the Secretary determines that “situational awareness” hasn’t been achieved, then they’re going to do a report at end of two years. It’s Washington jargon. What does that mean? “Situational awareness”? The language is, “Guys at the border, you now have authority to do your job that we’ve asked you not to do up to this point.” It’s about that simple. So do we trust that under Obama’s executive powers he’s going to actually put this in place? Or are we going to hand him a bill where he can say, “hey, we just passed a bill, did border enforcement, so now that everything’s safe, it’s good to do amnesty, and go to phase two?”
Brat said that the money McCaul wants to throw at the border without actually securing it—or stopping illegal immigration with real interior enforcement—is a “slush fund” for Obama’s open borders policies.
“If you read the bill carefully, there’s $10 billion in a slush fund to help the status quo do what it’s doing now,” Brat said.
Brat also hammered McCaul for failing to include E-Verify in the bill, which means under McCaul’s bill there would be plenty of opportunities for illegal aliens to continue taking jobs away from struggling American citizens.
“Just another simple thing: there’s no mandatory E-Verify,” Brat said. “That’s the key piece. It doesn’t shut down the spigot. All the incentives are still in place for folks to come here.”
Brat specifically nailed the Chamber of Commerce for backing such phony plans.
“Call up the Chamber of Commerce,” he implored listeners of the radio program. “They’re in favor of a lot of this cheap labor stuff going forward so have people call them to hold their feet to the fire a little bit to make sure that [the Chamber] understand[s] that they represent business, but they also represent the American people who own those businesses.”
“My job is to represent the American people, not special interests,” Brat added.
Brat’s argument that McCaul’s bill is the first in a series of forthcoming bills—therefore a “Trojan Horse” for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens—was confirmed earlier by a report from Roll Call’s Emma Dumain.
“Republicans who want to tackle the immigration issue, despite having come up short in the previous Congress, say passing McCaul’s bill will help make the task more palatable this time around: Many members say they won’t even look at fixing other areas of the nation’s flawed immigration laws until they are guaranteed more border enforcement,” Dumain wrote before quoting Speaker John Boehner’s confidante Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) as saying that discussions about what to move to after McCaul’s bill—including perhaps amnesty—are “without a doubt” happening behind closed doors in leadership right now.
“I actually think this makes other pieces easier to vote for, if you’re comfortable that an adequate security piece is in place,” Cole said of McCaul’s bill, stating essentially plainly that his friend Boehner plans to use McCaul’s bill to then push amnesty and other controversial elements of immigration legislation. “I don’t think doing border security and stopping would be the appropriate thing to do when we know there are other areas where we can get some things done.”
In a joint statement on Thursday morning, McCaul and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) plainly stated that McCaul’s bill is just the beginning of many more immigration bills that the House GOP leadership team and their committees are planning.
“House Republicans are taking a step-by-step approach to deliver on these long-overdue promises made to the American people so that we gain operational control of our borders and guarantee that our immigration laws will be enforced moving forward,” they said. “The Secure Our Border First Act is the first step and will move our nation closer to gaining control of our borders so that we thwart national security threats and stop illegal border crossers from coming to the U.S.”
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