Tea at Trianon: Biden Blames Trump

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 26, 2021

Biden Blames Trump

From The Daily Signal:

To end the problem, the Trump administration sought help from Congress in the form of additional funding to build the border wall; an end to the Flores Agreement, which a single federal judge expanded over the decades into an unrealistic order that children could not be detained more than 20 days; and a legislative fix so that the Department of Homeland Security could treat unaccompanied alien children from Central America the same as those from Mexico.

Congress refused. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and others on the left denied there was a border crisis (sound familiar?) and the government shut down in a stalemate.

The Trump administration had to end the crisis on its own. Choosing a heretofore unused, but statutorily authorized “Remain in Mexico” program, it negotiated with Mexico to house migrants seeking U.S. asylum on the Mexico side of the border during their pending court proceedings.

When would-be migrants learned claiming fear alone was no longer their ticket into the U.S., the caravans stopped coming.

The Trump administration also used leverage with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to negotiate Asylum Cooperative Agreements that resulted in those countries (and Mexico) enforcing their own borders to prevent migrant flows, building up their own asylum systems, and receiving nationals back who traversed their country, but had not requested asylum before seeking it at the U.S. border.

In short, the Trump administration imposed consequences for illegal immigration and ended “catch and release.”

It worked.

The number of Customs and Border Protection encounters rapidly declined to 52,000 by September 2019, and fell further to 36,000 in February 2020, before COVID-19 travel restrictions were imposed. (Read more.)