The Dems 100% own the border crisis. That doesn't mean the GOP is smart enough to get credit for stepping up to fix this mess.
Border Cynicism Costs the GOP
Democrat Tom Suozzi backs a border deal and takes back a House seat.
By The Editorial Board
Feb. 14, 2024 6:45 pm ET
Republicans think President Biden’s border disaster is their killer political issue, but what they’re offering as a solution is a futile gesture. In a 214-213 vote Tuesday night, the House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the second try. At the same time, the GOP lost a special election in suburban New York to a Democrat who supports a bill to do something at the border.
Mr. Mayorkas is the first cabinet secretary to be impeached since 1876, but nobody expects he’ll be convicted and removed by Chuck Schumer’s Senate. Meantime, Republicans have torpedoed the border bill negotiated by GOP Sen. James Lankford, though it would tighten the legal standard for migrants claiming asylum in the U.S., while allowing an emergency border shutdown to stop the current crisis.
“If I was in Congress, I would absolutely support it,” said former Rep. Tom Suozzi, running to retake his old House seat on Long Island. He called the proposal a “bipartisan compromise that offers our best chance at securing the border in 40 years.”
Republicans tried to paint Mr. Suozzi as an open-borders radical, but obviously that didn’t work. After polls suggested the race was neck and neck, he romped to victory Tuesday by about eight points.
Mazi Pilip, the GOP’s candidate, called the Lankford deal an “absolute nonstarter,” but she didn’t have a real substitute. In her debate with Mr. Suozzi, she simply repeated that she wanted to secure the border, build the wall, tighten the asylum rules, and so forth. Yet as Mr. Suozzi correctly pointed out, getting 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate requires bipartisan dealmaking. Many voters are fed up with border sloganeering. They want to fix the problem.
Voters in New York’s 3rd District are probably also still angry at the last Republican they took a flyer on and sent to Congress in 2022. That would be George Santos, who was exposed as an astonishing fabulist and then expelled by the House, setting up this week’s special election. Mr. Suozzi is well known after running for Governor two years ago as a moderate, but Ms. Pilip was elected to a county post in 2021 and lacks a long record.
Aside from wanting to punish Republicans for the Santos debacle, some voters perhaps worried they didn’t know enough about her. The press reported that Ms. Pilip was a registered Democrat who at one point owed tens of thousands of dollars in overdue taxes. For weeks she refused to say how she voted in 2020, and she declined interview requests.
A snow storm on Tuesday didn’t help Ms. Pilip. About 80,000 votes were banked before Election Day, per Politico, and registered Democrats held an edge in both early and mail ballots. Many Republicans have imbibed Donald Trump’s dislike for early voting, and one result is that GOP candidates start Election Day in a hole. Sometimes it then snows.
As he often does, Mr. Trump strolled in late Tuesday night to shoot the wounded. He blamed the defeat on Ms. Pilip for not having endorsed him for President and causing the MAGA vote to stay home. But Ms. Pilip didn’t criticize Mr. Trump and ran on his anti-immigration and anti-crime agenda. Maybe swing suburban voters don’t like the MAGA GOP.
It’s hazardous to read too much into a single special election, but if Republicans want to keep the House this fall and pick up the Senate, they need the suburban voters they lost on Tuesday. Mr. Suozzi’s victory is another lesson about the perils of choosing easy partisan posturing over the hard work that the American public actually wants done.
Voters know Mr. Mayorkas’s impeachment won’t do a lick of good at the border. Watching the GOP House, they see nothing but grandstanding, internal fighting, and an inability to put together a majority for anything but gestures. Mr. Suozzi exploited that record to further erode the tenuous GOP majority.
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