After both parties received, at best, C-minus grades from voters in the midterm elections, a lame-duck Congress will reconvene next week to take care of unfinished business. By far, the most important matter for Congress to address is funding the government for the remainder of the fiscal year — a formidable task in itself. But it will be hard to resist the temptation to sneak in legislation on a few unpopular pet issues now that members are no longer accountable to voters.
Proponents of unchecked immigration have a long history of labeling anyone and everyone who advocates for limits on immigration and for the rule of law. In the early 2000s, it began with the Southern Poverty Law Center labeling just about every organization calling for reducing immigration or enforcing immigration laws as “hate groups.”
President Joe Biden checked a box on Sunday. In a transparent attempt to silence a growing chorus of criticism about his failure to get a firsthand look at the state of the border – where over 5 million have illegally entered under his watch – the president finally deigned to take three hours out of his weekend getaway in Delaware to visit El Paso.
With the turn of the calendar and the unofficial start of the 2024 campaign cycle, President Biden took two steps designed to quell the growing furor over his handling of the raging, self-inflicted border crisis.
At the mid-point of President Biden’s term in office, some 5.5 million migrants have illegally crossed our southern border and made their way into almost every community across the United States. No longer able to deny that more than a quarter of a million illegal migrants a month is a problem – much less a crisis – the administration began 2023 by taking steps to cover up the magnitude of the problem.
Even in a nation that includes the principle of separation of church and state in its founding document, for centuries our political leaders have often heeded the counsel of religious leaders on important moral issues of the day. But religious leaders, like politicians, have had a mixed record when it comes to being on the right side of history. The antebellum South had more than its share of pastors who found justification in Scripture for maintaining slavery. Father Charles Coughlin was perhaps the most prominent American Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s.