Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) was picked over Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) by the Steering Committee to chair the House Homeland Security Committee, which will oversee border security, cyber, emergency response, and other homeland security issues.
Green — a physician, retired U.S. Army major, and a member of the House Freedom Caucus — plans to focus on the physical border, in addition to cybersecurity and interagency coordination in cyberspace. He will also have two full-time committee staffers stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The staffers will ”be sitting there with [Customs and Border Protection],” Green told reporters, “sending us real-time updates on what CBP needs and the issues – whether it’s a big drug bust at the border, we’ll send a bunch of members down for, you know, for that and those kinds of things.”
A Republican-led Homeland Security Committee will have a significant role in overseeing the border and policies related to the surge in border crossings, such as bringing Biden-appointed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in to testify.
Green being picked for the position over Crenshaw, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is a significant win for the more conservative flank of House Republicans, which wanted more of its members to have chairmanships and representation on key panels in the lower chamber.
Additionally, unlike Crenshaw, who is from Texas, Green is from the heartland and is well positioned to ensure coastal investors cannot exploit immigration to skew job-creating investment toward coastal states. Unskilled immigrants flooding states with cheap labor reduces more valuable high-tech investment in these states, pushing working voters out of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs.
House Homeland Security Committee member Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) attends a hearing on ‘worldwide threats to the homeland’ in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill September 17, 2020 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
When Green visited the border with now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) last year, he said, “President Biden, in his quest to change the landscape of America, has allowed in the past year — if you count got aways and encounters — 3.5 million people to illegally come into the United States,” adding that the current administration has “disastrous open border policies.”
“There are 21 states in our nation whose population is less than 3.3 million. He’s allowing a moderate-sized state into the nation every year,” he explained. “The added cost and uncompensated healthcare [and] the massive demand on social services is destroying opportunities for less fortunate Americans.”
Green also emphasized the damage caused by the cartel’s smuggling of drugs across the border in his speech: “Texas is undergoing another invasion. All our border states need everything that we can give them. Joe Biden’s disastrous open border policies have turned operational control of the U.S. southern border over to the drug cartels.”
The Tennessee Republican went on to say that the cartels have “neutralize[d]” CBP by “forcing them to thin the line in remote areas and concentrate their forces and human crossing sites,” which end up allowing the cartels to then “push waves of camouflaged carpet shoe-wearing mules across the remote areas of the border with backpacks filled with fentanyl.”
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.