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| Stonewalling the Wall |
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By Betsy McCaughey
Thursday, December 27 2018 |
Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is mocking "the very dopey people" contributing to a GoFundMe campaign to support President Donald Trump's southern border wall. All Kimmel's got to lose by insulting supporters of the wall is his ratings. But Democrats are risking a voter backlash by stonewalling Trump's request for border funding and claiming that only racists and xenophobes want a wall. More voters name illegal immigration as the most urgent problem for Congress to fix than any other issue, according to the latest Rasmussen national survey. A staggering 21 percent of those polled say they'd contribute their own money to build a wall if Congress refuses. No wonder the dollars are pouring in. The GoFundMe campaign raised a staggering $16 million by Sunday, the third-largest haul in history. It was launched by Air Force vet Brian Kolfage, who lost three limbs in combat in Iraq and received a Purple Heart. Watching Kimmel, who has no record of military service, ridicule Kolfage's cause is nauseating. The point is that Kimmel's rant is typical of the bicoastal elite. They're indifferent to problems affecting average working Americans, including the threats posed by open borders. As illegal immigrant families flood into our communities, public schools and social services are stretched thin. Place a migrant child who speaks no English and lacks school skills in a classroom, and all the teacher's attention has to be focused on that one child. The other kids lose out. The elite don't feel it. Hollywood big shots don't send their kids to public schools. More than half of voters think illegal immigration is a strain on the U.S. budget and believe a wall should be a part of the solution, according to Rasmussen. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, soon to be speaker of the House, is out of touch with these Middle American concerns. That's why she made the embarrassing mistake in last week's face-to-face meeting with Trump of predicting he'd never get enough votes in the House for $5 billion border funding. She was wrong. On Thursday night, the House approved $5.7 billion for the wall, and sent the measure over to the Senate on Friday. There it has stalled, because it needs nine Democratic votes to pass. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is vowing no votes from his party for border funding. As the stalemate drags on, the government is officially shutdown, because border funding is part of the overall appropriations package to keep the lights on and the paychecks flowing. Trump has signaled willingness to compromise on the dollar figure. But Democrats reject any compromise. "If you want to open the government, you must abandon the wall," Schumer said on the Senate floor Saturday. Democrats insist that a wall is racist and immoral. Don't fall for it. Last week, Senator Chris Murphy, D-Conn., slammed Republicans for wanting a wall with Mexico but not Canada "the country filled mostly with white people." Murphy's dishonesty is staggering. He's not admitting that 521,090 people were apprehended illegally sneaking across the southern border in 2018, compared with a paltry 324 people crossing illegally from Canada, according to Homeland Security. The wall is needed on the southern border because that's where the lawbreakers are. As Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out, insisting on no border wall is like demanding no TSA agents at airports. Ridiculous. Meanwhile, not a creature is stirring at the Capitol during Christmas, and the earliest a compromise could be reached is Dec. 27, though it could drag on much longer. No matter how it turns out, Democrats are smearing large swaths of voters as racist and immoral because they support the wall. It's a repeat of when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Trump supporters could be put in a "basket of deplorables," meaning racists and xenophobes. Sixty days after she hurled that insult, she lost the heartland states and with them the 2016 election. The debate over the wall is like Deplorables Redux. Democrats take note. Insults are not a winning strategy. Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York State. |
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