As President Joe Biden’s first 100 days are officially up and he has now given his first formal address to Congress, the nation, it seems, is all about commenting on the job he’s done so far.
Naturally, there are great many who would approve of the tasks he had done so far. And just as naturally, there are plenty who are wholeheartedly dissatisfied and disappointed.
But don’t think for just a minute that all those in opposition to his work so far are those of a differing party. Instead, you might be shocked to learn, or maybe not, that Biden has made quite a few enemies within the Democratic Party.
And it seems that as he allows the crisis at our southern border to grow and escalate, those numbers are only increasing.
Take Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, for example.
Once a staunch Biden supporter, Kelly is now growing ever closer to the point when he rescinds that support. As it stands now, he’s already criticizing Biden on his job to get the border crisis under control.
In a statement posted to his website shortly after Biden’s congressional address, Kelly stated, “While I share President Biden’s urgency in fixing our broken immigration system, what I didn’t hear tonight was a plan to address the immediate crisis at the border, and I will continue holding this administration accountable to deliver the resources and staffing necessary for a humane, orderly process as we work to improve border security, support local economies, and fix our immigration system.”
And fellow Democrat and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has similar words for Biden’s administration. As her office noted, the border state native “wants to see more action from the administration to address the border crisis and support Arizona border communities.”
It is also important to note that Sinema, along with several Republican Congress members, has put a bipartisan bill forward that would seek to address these issues directly, should Biden not act on them soon.
But it’s not just border state lawmakers that see the need for immediate and more aggressive action to be taken at the southern border.
Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono from Hawaii has also recently condemned the administration’s lack of action thus far.
In an interview with PBS News’ Margaret Hoover on Friday, Hirono was in no small way critical of the administration’s border control so far – staring with Vice President Kamala Harris’ failure to even visit the border and see the chaos and turmoil first hand.
When asked by Hoover why she thought Harris hadn’t traveled south yet, Hirono replied, “I don’t know. Maybe – We have a few other things to deal with, like the pandemic and everything else, so I’m not going to point fingers at her in the sense of – I hope that she will go down to the border. I hope that we can have a comprehensive, ‘whole of government’ approach to what we need to do to have a humane immigration system.”
When it comes to Biden, she pretty much said it’s foolish for him to not call what is going on down there a crisis. Hirono told Hoover, “I would call it a crisis. We can call it a challenge. But we know what the factors are. We know what is happening. So whatever you call it, we’re going to need to deal with it. We’re going to need to address it in a humane way.”
But Biden and Harris both seem unwilling or incapable of doing so.
Sure, they’ve made changes to our immigration system. They did that on day one in office, canceling Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy and practically inviting all those even remotely considering a trip to the US, whether legally or not, to go ahead and come on over.
And it’s caused the problems that already existed only to worsen.
Of course, Biden says that this is all Trump’s fault, that his administration “inherited one godawful mess at the border.”
But when we look at immigration numbers from the end of Trump’s tenure in the White House until now, there’s one thing that becomes starkly evident: Things didn’t really start to get bad until Biden took over.
As NBC News host Craig Melvin recently pointed out, April saw about 170,000 migrants detained at the border, which is a definite record and “sounds to most folks like a crisis.”
And yet, Biden says, “It’s way down now. We’ve now gotten control.” But they haven’t, or the numbers wouldn’t be going up.
No wonder those in his own party are turning on him and demanding more.
