Joe Biden is a political animal. What sort of animal is debatable, but certainly, a jellyfish comes to mind for a lot of us.
If there's one quality all good presidents have, it is steadfastness in the face of opposition. Abraham Lincoln early in the Civil War was pressured to relieve Gen. Ulysses S. Grant because of perceived failings at the battle of Shiloh. Members of his administration, Republicans in Congress, newspaper editors — everyone — was calling for Grant's scalp.
"I can't spare this man," Lincoln said of Grant. He fights."
Soon after Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for striking illegally, most of official Washington and the usual liberal media put pressure on Reagan to rehire them. Reagan didn't budge: “If you're going to go on strike, you're going to lose your job, and we'll make out without you.”
That kind of sticktoitiveness is missing in Joe Biden. This has nothing to do with age. Reagan was just a few years younger than Biden when he faced down the air traffic controllers. This is a question of raw character, and Biden doesn't have any.
Last week, Biden made a big splash by announcing that he was closing the border when the flow of asylum seekers crossing the border exceeded 2,500 a day. The left erupted in rage. It was a "betrayal" of their cherished beliefs.
Biden, in the midst of floundering presidential campaign, is preparing to backtrack. He is readying another "magic wand" executive order where he just waves his hand and makes groundbreaking law.
The White House is considering a "parole in place" to apply to illegal immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens. Ordinarily, illegal spouses have to go through a process of filling out forms and being interviewed like any other non-citizen looking to live and work in the U.S.
There are about 1.1 million illegal alien spouses in the United States. Biden wants to do away with those common-sense precautions and just open the door and wave them in.
The administration already terribly abuses the "parole" system. Biden admits "over 1,500 a day via the ports of entry using the CBP One app, as well as 30,000 a month using parole processes for nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela," according to Fox News.
"As we have said before, the Administration continues to explore a series of policy options, and we remain committed to taking action to address our broken immigration system," a White House spokesperson told Fox News in response to the reports.
Parole more broadly has been used by the Biden administration to admit over 1,500 a day via the ports of entry using the CBP One app, as well as 30,000 a month using parole processes for nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Parole in place has been rumored as a potential move by the administration for months and has been directly called for by immigration advocates. FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group, estimates that there are approximately 1.1 million spouses of U.S. citizens living in the U.S. illegally, and the group says it would add $16 billion to the economy if they were made U.S. citizens.
"Mr. Biden can rise to the moment by leveraging the parole power to fulfill his promise to keep families together," Andrea Flores, a vice president for immigration policy and campaigns said in a Times op-ed.
"While these so-called mixed-status families may elicit sympathies, our immigration laws have a process for illegal alien spouses of U.S. citizens to follow to absolve their violations — a process the Biden Administration is ignoring to ease the burden on illegal aliens," Robert Law of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) said last month.
"This parole scheme could also be a starting point to ‘parole in place’ even larger, less sympathetic classes of illegal aliens, which would frustrate efforts by a future America First administration to enforce U.S. immigration law and remove illegal aliens from the country," he added.
Parole is one of the many loopholes that Republicans tried to close in HR 1, the immigration bill that the House passed last year but the Senate didn't even consider. It's not likely that Biden will be able to implement "parole in place" any more than he can get his strict asylum executive order past a court challenge.
That's fine with President Jellyfish.
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