'Political Messaging Exercise': James Lankford Explains Why He Will Vote Against Senate Border Bill

4 months ago

During remarks on the Senate floor, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) spoke about the Senate border security bill.

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Transcript

00:00 Senator from Oklahoma. Mr. President, three senators started about eight months ago now

00:06 working to try to get some solutions on border security. It's for obvious reasons

00:12 because we have record high numbers over and over and over again at our southern

00:16 border. We had a record high number in October, record high number in November,

00:20 record high number in December. In fact, December had the highest number of day,

00:23 highest number of illegal crossings ever in the history of the country in a

00:27 single day. As of yesterday, we had about 5,200 people that illegally crossed

00:32 yesterday. In fact, almost every day this year we've had more than 5,000 people

00:36 illegally crossing day after day after day. This is a very big issue that the

00:42 American people want solved. It is a frustrating issue that we've not been

00:46 able to get to a resolution on. It is an issue that people have been frustrated

00:49 with President Biden because President Biden has not enforced the border the

00:53 same way President Trump did or the same way President Obama did. To be clear, this

01:01 year we'll have two and a half million people illegally cross the border. With

01:05 the same law in place under President Obama, we had half a million people that

01:11 illegally crossed that year. And as I've raised over and over again with this

01:14 administration, if they would just enforce the border the same way

01:17 President Obama did, things would be very different. But they've chosen not to.

01:22 They've chosen not to enforce it the same way President Trump did. And instead, we

01:27 have absolutely been overrun with people from literally all over the world. To put

01:33 this in perspective, in the last three months we've had more people illegally

01:37 crossed than any full year under President Obama. They need to do what

01:45 they can do. But Congress needs to do what we can do. We've got to change the

01:50 definition of asylum. We've got to change the appeal process. We've got to be able

01:54 to speed up the process. We've got to provide more clarity so that we don't

01:58 have people waiting around eight years for a hearing. We can't just release

02:02 people at the border as what has happened day after day after day for

02:06 years now. We can't have a brand new parole program that the Biden

02:10 administration literally invented that no other president has ever used to

02:13 release thousands of people a day. We can't have that. We need to solve this in

02:18 the administration. We need to solve this in Congress. I wish that's what we were

02:23 doing today, but we're not. When Senator Murphy and Senator Sinema and I started

02:29 working on this months ago, we were working to solve it. We were not able to

02:34 get that done. But today is not a bill. Today is a prop. Today is a political

02:42 messaging exercise. Today is an opportunity to be able to have a vote

02:46 that's sitting out there so people can send fundraising emails out later

02:49 tonight and say, "Look, I tried to do something," when no work was actually done

02:53 to try to get something done and completed and passed today. In fact, I

02:57 anticipate there'll be fewer votes today than there were two months ago when this

03:03 came up on both sides of the aisle, because everyone sees this for what it

03:08 is. It is not an effort to actually make law. It is an effort to do political

03:13 messaging. That doesn't help us as a country. We still have people that are

03:19 illegally present here that need attention, and we're not getting it. Now,

03:26 we can say Democrats can bring this bill up and say, "Look, we tried to do something."

03:29 Well, so what? Republicans can do the same thing. We brought House Resolution 2

03:34 twice to this body. That's passed the House with a broad sweeping piece of

03:40 approval in the House to come over here to be able to change the way that

03:44 actually asylum is done, the entire process. That's been voted down twice on

03:49 a strictly partisan vote. So we can have this vote today, and people can say, "Well,

03:54 Republicans voted against this, so it didn't pass." Republicans can say, "Democrats

03:58 didn't vote for H.R. 2, so that didn't pass." That still doesn't solve the

04:01 problem. At the end of the day, the people in my state say, "There's another 5,000

04:06 people that illegally crossed the border. Why aren't we sitting down and resolving

04:09 that?" So today, I'm going to vote no on a bill that I think should pass, but

04:16 there's been no effort to really get this to pass. Let's get this back to the

04:20 table. Let's actually resolve this issue as we need to get done. With that, I yield

04:25 the floor.

'Political Messaging Exercise': James Lankford Explains Why He Will Vote Against Senate Border Bill

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