Republicans say they care about 'the border crisis.' Here’s what they actually care about

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has told his Republican colleagues that a bipartisan immigration reform bill that’s currently being negotiated in the US Senate is “dead on arrival.” He had previously said the “border crisis” was so imperiling that he couldn’t possibly consider anything else, not even aid to Ukraine, until the matter was resolved.

His heel-turn is probably best explained by Mitt Romney. “The border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” the US senator said recently. “The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”

That gave the game away, Bill Scher said.

“Romney and other Republicans have, directly or indirectly, admitted that blocking progress on the border — a problem Republican themselves angrily insist is a dire threat to our national security — only serves Trump's political interest and not the national interest.”

That seems to be where we’re leaving it.

The Republicans demanded that the president do something! Joe Biden said, OK, let’s do this! Some, especially in the Senate, recognized what he was offering – their best chance in decades to achieve their immigration wish-list. Then came their presumptive nominee, saying nah nah nah. Apparently, a live problem is better than a dead solution.

And yet that’s where we seem to be leaving it. It’s like we’re so accustomed to everything beginning and ending with Trump that we can’t imagine another way of interpreting this. Here’s another way.

The Republicans don’t care about immigration. Not really. They don’t believe there’s an “open border.” They don’t believe migrants are “invading” the country. They don’t believe anything they say about it.

They don’t care, and we know they don’t care, because when offered the best opportunity to achieve their goals – including reforms to asylum laws and even “shutting down” the border, Biden said – they decline. We know they don’t care, because when they have a chance to do something about things that they say they care about, they don’t.

We know they don’t care, moreover, because their stated reasons for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are not really reasons. They say he’s failing to obey immigration law. What they mean is that too many people are being released into the country. What they don’t say about that is the Trump administration released more people into the country than the Biden administration has.

You could read this as rank hypocrisy, but that would presume these Republicans care about higher-order things that the rest of us might appeal to in order to shame them into behaving better. But they don’t care about higher-order things, because nothing really matters to them except one thing: the power to dominate and control people. These Republicans will say anything if saying it achieves that goal.

We also know, to these Republicans, that there is no such thing as a higher-order thing the rest of us might appeal to in order to shame them, because they take the highest of higher-order things – the US Constitution – as a suggestion, something to be considered at their convenience, rather than what it is, the highest of higher-order things.

The Constitution is very clear about which part of the political system is in change of immigration. It’s the federal government. But because the Republicans recognize a chance to seize power to dominate and control, Texas is now saying its right to self-defense against “invading” migrants is “the supreme law.” Twenty-five GOP governors support that view. It’s all made up. That’s my point. They will say anything.

You could say politics is about power, after all. To that, I say let’s not confuse the desire for power with caring about things. If you believe the border is in crisis, if you believe it’s open, if you believe rapists and drug dealers are pouring over, threatening your way of life, and all that other white-power stuff – if you believe that, then you should be expected to care enough to use the power you have to address it.

The story right now is that the House Republicans are teeing up an issue for Donald Trump to run on. We should not leave it at that. We should recognize that the issue itself doesn’t matter to them. They don’t care. Not really. It’s a pretext for achieving a larger objective.

They are going to impeach Mayorkas for doing nothing about “the border crisis” while doing nothing about “the border crisis.” That should be seen as the purest distillation of the belief that nothing really matters except the power to dominate and control people.