The Border Czar Is No More Deserving Of The Presidency Than Trump Or Biden

If we're talking about Kamala Harris in this post's title, & we are, we know from her preferred gender pronouns that she would prefer czarina to czar.

Since the incessant overflow of migrants @ the southwest land border during the entire Biden/Harris term has finally moved border security near the top of concern for voters many Democrat pundits are saying that Biden never assigned Harris the role of Border Czar.

Checking the record we find that on March 24, 2021 Biden said "I've asked her, the VP, today - because she's the most qualified person to do it - to lead our efforts with Mexico & the Northern Triangle & the countries that help - are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border."  Click here to hear it in Biden's own words.

The definition of the noun czar is "a person appointed by the government to advise on & coordinate policy in a particular field" - sounds pretty close to what Biden asked Harris to do.  

NBC News reported that "the vice president is expected to focus on both curbing the current flow of migrants & coordinating with countries in the region to address the root causes (although Biden never used the words "root causes") of migration" - yet any activity by Harris over the last three & a half years regarding this assignment was confined to 1) a trip to Guatemala & Mexico on June 7, 2021: 2) a four hour trip to the El Paso Border Patrol station & the El Paso del Norte Port of Entry on June 25, 2021; 3) taking credit for a page & a half "Cover Message" to a National Security Council report entitled  "U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America" in July 2021; & 4) issuing a Fact Sheet: Update on the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America on March 25, 2024 that says "the Administration is on track to meet its commitment in the 2021 Root Causes Strategy to provide $4 billion to the region over four years."

Notice that Harris has always ignored the part of her responsibility regarding "stemming the migration to our southern border" while morphing her assignment into identifying & spending money addressing the root causes of migration from Northern Triangle countries, which root causes we always knew were corruption, violence, trafficking, & poverty.  This was all known before Harris even began her feeble pretense of doing anything constructively in this regard or even showing interest in any part of the assignment except for not being tarred politically with the border overflow problem plaguing the nation.  Over eight million migrants illegally entered the country while Harris worked on root causes & Biden provided no supervision "because she's the most qualified person to do it." 

Most importantly, if there was an effort by Harris to stem the migration it was a complete failure unless the goal was to bring in future Democrat party voters.  Now that the damage is done & the election is getting closer the Harris effort has turned to one of professing border responsibility & she has statistics to prove it.  For instance the July encounters (Border Patrol & Office Of Field Operations) totaled 104,118 down from 301,981 last December.  The table below confirms that the trend of the number of encounters declined in 2024.  Click on table to enlarge.

And of course this reduction was brought about for political reasons benefitting Biden/Harris & AMLO (Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador) because 2024 is a presidential  election year in both the U.S. & Mexico.  In April AMLO asked Biden to hold off issuing his planned executive order that disqualifies migrants from winning asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally until after the June 2 Mexican presidential election that was won by AMLO's hand picked successor Claudia Sheinbaum.  Two days after the AMLO protege's victory, Biden issued the EO that requires migrants to be deported quickly which, with AMLO's help, in turn has discouraged thousands of migrants from heading north in the first place - thus the lower number of border encounters as recorded in the above table.

A responsible U.S. citizenry should withhold their vote until Biden/Harris explains why this extraordinary cooperation with Mexico did not happen three & a half years ago & why the EO was not issued then also.  Writing the EO in 2024 acknowledges that Biden had the authority to do so all along but in a dereliction of duty didn't.

Instead Harris is trying to turn the issue around saying she has been a responsible leader on border security all along & that the lower number of border encounters confirms that.  Harris blames Congress & Trump for not giving Biden/Harris the laws needed to properly enforce border security earlier.

This complaint is a reference to the Border Act of 2024 - S.4361 - negotiated with much fanfare by senators Lankford (R-OK), Sinema (I-AZ), & Murphy (D-CT).  This bill failed a floor cloture vote 43 to 50 (only Republican to support the bill was Murkowski - Alaska) on May 23.  Harris claims Republican congressmen capitulated to Trump's demands to not pass the bill because it would give Democrats an advantage over Trump by taking away his perceived best issue - border security.

A better reason to vote against the bill is found in Section 3.01 of the bill entitled Border Emergency Authority, paragraph (3) entitled Activations of Authority that is divided into two sections - discretionary activation & mandatory activation.  The new border emergency authority under the bill pertains to the Secretary of Homeland Security's authority & duty to summarily remove from & prohibit the entry into the U.S. of all aliens, except unaccompanied minors, between ports of entry in response to extraordinary migration circumstances (that we have had since Biden/Harris took office three & a half years ago).

The discretionary activation to prohibit further alien migration can occur if during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days there is an average of 4,000 to 5,000 aliens who are encountered each day.  The mandatory activation to prohibit further alien migration shall occur if during a period of 7 consecutive calendar days there is an average of 5,000 or more aliens who are encountered each day; or on any one calendar day a combined total of 8,500 aliens are encountered.

The outrageous part of hiding behind this bill having not been passed as the reason the border is out of control is that one or more of the above activation levels were hit every month that Biden/Harris has been in office except for February 2021 (their first full month in office when the caravans we're just gearing up) & July 2024 (for reasons detailed above).  See graphic below that shows the total number of encounters for each of the last twelve years & the average number of encounters per day for each of the years.  Click on graphic to enlarge.

How could Biden issue his Executive Order prohibiting entry two days after the Mexican election that placed even stricter limits (2,500 border encounters per day) on unauthorized crossings than the failed border bill described above if he had no authority to do so all along?  Answer - Biden always had the authority to control the border but chose not to.  The migration has only slowed as a result of enforcement of the EO so that Harris can use the lower number of crossings & encounters as a talking point to disguise her did-nothing record.

If we are all on the same team & Biden/Harris thought they didn't have the legal authority from Congress to enforce border security why didn't they meet with congressional leaders to explain the problem so that Congress could write a law they could enforce?

Harris has become so aggressive on border security she has even shamelessly shown a TV ad as part of her campaign highlighting the border she never visited with the voice-over saying how tough she is & that she will hire thousands of border patrol agents.

Now a vice president is subservient to their president & in order to make an informed vote a voter has to find out how much of the president's policy the vice president (Harris in this case) truly believed in.  For instance we know in 1996 that Jack Kemp temporarily put aside his supply side economic principles to support Bob Dole's economic plan for the country.  It was something Kemp had to do to be on the Dole ticket & I for one never felt Kemp had abandoned supply side economics.  After the campaign Kemp returned to champion supply side economics once again.

Based on Harris's improvement in the polls since becoming the presidential nominee it seems that voters are not holding her accountable for much of Biden's unpopular policies even though she made the tie breaking vote in the Senate on a record number 33 bills.  Source - Ballotpedia.

But Harris's record is all over the progressive lot from her days as California AG & senator.  Now she wants voters to believe she is for the strongest, most lethal military on earth, funding the police, respecting ICE, fracking, & supporting a bill that would resume building the wall that Trump never finished.  This from a self-proclaimed moderate candidate who was against all of these things just two months ago when she was more progressive supporting single payer Medicare for All while abolishing private healthcare insurance, outlawing gas stoves & gasoline-powered cars, supporting the disastrous Afghan withdrawal (after all she was the last person in the room with Biden on that decision), & wanting people who were never slave holders to pay reparations to people who were never slaves.  More recently Harris has been for national price controls @ least for groceries & the terrible ideas of no tax on tips, raising the top marginal tax rates on capital gains & wages, & taxing unrealized capital gains on the tippy top 0.01% of wealthiest households as if this would not trickle (flood) down to middle class households when she needed more revenue.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton says Harris must explain when & why she adopted her current policy views.

But Harris is quite content to keep a low profile & slide into the White House as a blank slate if she can get away with it.  The hostile anti-American media will not help in any substantial way so that leaves Trump having to drag her contradictory record out to the public in a way that makes sense because she has no intention of explaining any more of her record than she has to.

I don't think Trump can do it.

All in all, Harris is no more deserving of the presidency than Trump or Biden.

Fact Checking The Debate: Biden's Senility v. Trump's False Claims

Even the least discerning readers of this blog know that the theme of most posts over the last four years has been that neither Biden or Trump is fit to be president of the United States - some post titles were dead giveaways to this theme such as Neither Trump Nor Biden Deserves To Be President Again & Both Trump & Biden Have Disqualified Themselves From The Presidency.

Biden's performance in the June 27 presidential debate was so dismal that it not only caused him to drop out of the race but it made Trump's false claims during the debate that much harder to pick up except for professional fact checkers & readers of RTE.  

For instance, Trump absurdly stated, totally out of touch with political reality, that "everybody" wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with each state making their own abortion policy.  Trump said "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives.  Everybody wanted it back.  Religious leaders." & then added "Every legal scholar wanted it that way."  This falsehood was stunning to me.

Starting with conservative Kansas, less than two months after Roe was overturned, state after state (Kentucky, California, Vermont, Michigan, & Ohio) moved in the pro abortion direction with ballot initiatives.  Eleven other states (Florida, Arizona, Montana, Kentucky, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, & Maryland) are planning to put abortion directly on the ballot in November to either directly reject further restrictions or fully enshrine abortion into their constitutions.  We know that Trump is aware that the 2022 midterm supposed "red wave" Republican victory never appeared because it was overwhelmed by the abortion issue - prompting Trump to say "You have to win elections" so say or do whatever you have to on abortion "to win elections."  And that is exactly what Trump did during the presidential debate.

But Biden was so inept during the debate that he could not even muster up a response to Trump's gross misstatement on abortion.

When Biden could try (instead of just standing there with his mouth open) to discuss an issue it too was terrible.  For instance, Biden's claim that "Truth is, I'm the only president this century that doesn't have any, this decade, that doesn't have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did," referring to Trump.

Of course this falsehood does not mention the thirteen U.S. service members (11 Marines, one Army special operations soldier, and one Navy corpsman) who were killed in the suicide bombing @ the airport in Kabul during the hideous Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 following the Taliban re-taking of the country.  Biden also overlooks the three U.S. soldiers killed this year in Jordan by a drone attack instigated by Iran-backed militants.  Also two U.S. Navy Seals died in January in Somolian waters while attempting to seize lethal aid being transported from Iran to Yemen, & five U.S. soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the Mediterranean Sea in November 2023 during a routine refueling mission.  Lastly, eight U.S. airmen died in a CV-22 Osprey crash off the coast of Yakushima Island, Japan.

All told, according to the CNN fact checker Daniel Dale (whose work I relied on in this post based on my personal knowledge & previous RTE posts) Biden made @ least nine false or misleading statements during the debate - hard to believe he could muster up that many statements, false or otherwise.  Biden's misleading statements wandered through claims of Trump wanting to eliminate Social Security, saying unemployment was 15% when he took office, & incorrectly saying the Border Patrol union endorsed him before clarifying that he meant the border bill he had backed that was negotiated by Lankford (R-OK), Sinema (I-AZ), & Murphy (D-CT).

But the enormous unanswered question is why is Biden still president if he is so incapacitated that he could not perform better in a debate on his favored CNN.  If the debate proved anything it is that Biden should finally be given the cognitive test as a bare bones minimum to see if he can finish his term.  In the meantime, if this elderly man with a poor memory, who is @ least slightly senile, continues as president we are literally playing with a stick of dynamite that has a lit fuse.

Also, Kamala Harris immediately came on TV after the debate & continued the lie that Biden is as sharp as can be behind closed doors - this was before the knives came out to get rid of Biden's liability as a candidate for president.  But Harris certainly knew better - like all of us.  This is one of the questions she should answer along with 1) what is fracking, & 2) in your assignment from President Biden to lead our efforts with Mexico & the Northern Triangle countries to stem migration to our southern border did you ever issue a written report addressing both the root causes of & your recommendations for quieting the disorder @ the southwest land border that began right after the Biden-Harris administration took office.  Questions 1 & 2 were recommended by Steve Moore & Bill O'Reilly respectively.

Fact checker Dale logged in nine whoppers for Biden during the debate & "@ least thirty for Trump."

During the debate Trump said 1) that Democrats will kill babies in the "eighth month, the ninth month of pregnancy, or even after birth" (no state allows infanticide & 95.6% of abortions occur before 16 weeks of pregnancy & only 0.9% occurred @ 21 weeks or later in 2020); 2) that Biden will quadruple people's taxes (Biden's budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 calls for people making $60,000 per year to pay less tax than under current law while middle income households would pay about the same); 3) that Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (there is no record of Trump offering troops to Pelosi & even if he did Pelosi has no authority over the deployment of the District of Columbia National Guard, which is under the command of the president); 4) that Americans don't pay the cost of his tariffs on China & other countries (it is U.S. importers, not Chinese exporters, who make the actual tariff payments to the government meaning the American consumer ultimately foots the bill); 5) that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud (there has never been any evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state, but we do know that Rudy, Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, & Sydney Powell have experienced a world of hurt claiming otherwise & Fox paid almost $1 billion to Dominion for broadcasting such falsehoods); 6) that under Biden, "We have the largest (trade) deficit with China" (in 2023 the Biden trade deficit with China was the lowest since 2010 while under Trump in 2018 the trade deficit with China hit a new record high - see graphic below); & 7) that the U.S. currently has its biggest budget deficit (this claim from Trump who presided over the largest deficit spending in any four year period since the founding of the country - see graphic below.)

  Click on graphic to enlarge

Over the years I have written about the significance of the national debt many times in blog posts & over the past four years have received many comments from die hard Trump supporters who acknowledge that Trump is the biggest four year spender in the country's history but shrug it off by saying "In my opinion, voters don't care about ... the debt."

Now isn't it one thing to not care about the national debt & another thing to not care about being lied to about it?

Biden's Press Secretary Can't Identify Inflation Factors Without Implicating Democrat Party

"We got a lot of incoming on this yesterday & look, the point that the president was making is that the factors that cause inflation were in place when he took office."  - White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answering a question on May 15 from Ed Lawrence (FBN) regarding Biden's repeated claim that inflation was 9% when he took office instead of 1.4% as reported by the BLS.  (Note - KJP's quote is cleaned up grammatically & repeated "uh"s removed.)

The interesting thing about KJP's above statement is that it is correct - but she can't tell the public why without fingering her boss; namely that the highest inflation factor put in place under Trump in 2020 was $3.6 trillion of irresponsible stimulus deficit spending - the exact same type of irresponsible stimulus deficit spending that Biden did in 2021 to the tune of $1.9 trillion.  KJP can't identify irresponsible stimulus deficit spending by Trump as the root cause of our inflation problem because it is the heart & soul of Democrats' answer for everything they see.

Professor Friedman taught that inflation "is always & everywhere, a monetary phenomenon.  It's always & everywhere, a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than an output.  Moreover, in the modern era, the important next step is to recognize that today, governments control the quantity of money.  So that as a result, inflation in the United States is made in Washington & nowhere else."  The great libertarian professor used graphs during his lectures that prove that there has never been an inflation in history that was not accompanied by an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money & interchangeably there has never been an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money without an inflation.  

Professor Friedman explained that during Diocletian's rule of the Roman Empire (284 to 305) the money supply was increased by replacing the silver in full body silver coins like the denarius with a worthless alloy, until the denarius (once equal to a day's pay for a common laborer or a quart of wheat plus 3 quarts of barley)) became little more than a copper coin with a wash of silver.  As silver was spread (i.e., the % of silver decreased) into more & more coins, the denarius lost value & prices were distorted by inflation.

We are currently seeing the definition of inflation play out - namely, what happens when too much money chases too few goods & services.   

Conservative pundits like to blame our inflation misery (real wages are still 0.8% below 2019 levels) on Biden's signing of a giant $1.9 trillion stimulus bill as if Trump's $3.6 trillion spending spree the year before, including $900 billion in December, 2020, has nothing to do with our inflation.  The conservatives never mention Trump's even larger contribution to the inflation problem &, since inflation started to rise during Biden's first full month in office, leave that fact out.  But both Trump & Biden doled out direct deposits to adults & children & made substantial increases to unemployment benefits that made going to work less attractive than collecting these new benefits.  The quantity of money was increased under both Trump & Biden & the amount of goods & services produced (i.e., the real GDP) was reduced.  See graphic that follows.

The difference in Trump's case was that the lockdowns in 2020 provided a forced savings mechanism - i.e., there was no place to go to spend the money being doled out by the government.

Professor Friedman also taught that monetary changes (like the stimulus giveaways) have their effect (in this case inflation) only after a lag - that can be long & variable.  (Professor Friedman's research over 18 business cycles in the 19th & 20th centuries showed the lag between monetary policy action & its economic effect ranged between 4 & 29 months, but also that there was little basis for knowing where in this range it would fall.  Source - Bill Dupor, St. Louis Fed.)  This is something akin to not feeling the full effects of being in a car accident until 72 hours after the accident.  Source - my chiropractor.

Trump's spending binge in 2020 did not start to be felt with stepped up inflation until February, 2021.  This lag is easy to understand - the lockdowns had gradually been lifted & as a result people were able to start spending the direct deposits & enhanced unemployment benefits they had saved.  Unfortunately for Biden this noticeable stepped up inflation coincided with his first full month in office.  Biden then signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March, 2021 - his second full month in office - further fueling the inflation that was just beginning.  But note, inflation was on its way up before Biden signed one penny of inflationary stimulus into law.  The following graphic illustrates this point.

In concert with the above, the following graphic illustrates that while the M2 money supply was increasing 15.7% in the three months from February to May, 2020 the real GDP was decreasing 9.5% from December 31, 2019 to June 30, 2020 - i.e., "a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than an output."

The above graphic shows that consumer spending - personal consumption expenditures, PCE - (the main component of GDP) decreased 17.6% from February, 2020 to April, 2020 due to the lockdowns.  The graphic below shows the excessive savings (the amount above what would have been saved if there was no pandemic) that developed as a result of both Trump & Biden's stimulus spending being sent to people in a country in lockdown or partial lockdown.

Click here to hear KJP's exchange with Ed Lawrence where she blames everything she can think of to be the cause of our inflation problem except the real cause, namely irresponsible stimulus deficit spending signed into law by both Trump & Biden.  To identify Trump's spending binge in 2020 as the root cause of our inflation that was in place in January, 2021 would necessarily implicate & connect her boss, Joe Biden, as a willing offender of the same thing in 2021 as well as expose the Democrats' playbook for government dependency & all the misery & mediocrity that follows.