Sen. James Lankford Snipes at GOP Backlash to Border Bill On Fox & Friends: Read the Bill, ‘Don’t Just Go Off of Facebook’
Senator James Lankford defended the bipartisan border bill he co-authored amid Republican criticism and House Speaker Mike Johnson insisting it was “dead on arrival.”
The bill’s text became public Sunday evening, and the border security portion of a bill — that also allocated billions of funding to Ukraine and Israel — was roughly 250 pages. But even before the specifics of the border security portion were released, many pro-Trump members of US Congress have openly opposed the bill following the direction of former President Donald Trump, raising criticism that partisan politics are being prioritized over policy to deal with the crisis at the southern US border.
Brian Kilmeade first asked Lankford to respond to online criticism by his Republican Senate colleague Mike Lee, who said, “No self-respecting senator should agree to vote on a 370-page bill this week.”
“It’s interesting that he said he’s already opposed to it,” Senator Lankford noted. “He needs three weeks to be able to read it, but he’s already opposed to it. So again, people have got to be able to read it and go through it themselves. Don’t just go off of Facebook post somewhere what the bill says.”
Kilmeade then asked Lankford to share his thoughts on Speaker Johnson’s “dead on arrival” comment, to which Lankford said, “Unfortunate that he would step out and be able to see that right away, before, obviously, he had had a chance to be able to read it as well and to be able to go through it.”
“The key aspect of this, again, is are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the borders bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December?” Lankford pushed back. “Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things? Are we going to actually dress in a change as many things as we can if we have the shot?”
“And it’s amazing to me, if I go back two months ago and say we had a shot under a Democrat president to dramatically increase detention beds, deportation flights, locked down the border, to be able to change the asylum laws, to be able to accelerate the process. No one would have believed it,” Lankford continued. “And now no one actually wants to be able to fix it because I don’t want to even debate it. I don’t want to discuss it. We have to decide as Republicans, what are we going to actually do about the border, leave it open or actually leave it closed?”
Kilmeade then aired a clip of Speaker Johnson from Meet the Press saying Lankford’s bill was not serious because the border agents don’t need more laws or funding, just better adherence to the current laws on the books.
“We do have to be able to decide here because at one point I’ll hear people say, ‘We don’t need more laws. The president has all the authority they need,’ and then the other side says, ‘We need more than the laws that this is actually giving. So again, we have to decide, is this a matter of we have all the authorities that are needed,” Lankford replied.
“We need to do nothing, or we need to do everything because he doesn’t have the president, who doesn’t have enough authority. At the end of the day, let’s do everything we can. We do have a Democrat president,” he added. “We have a Democrat Senate. We have a Republican House. This is a moment to solve as many things as we can and then keep working on the next thing.”
Watch above via Fox News
