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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday criticized the 25 Republican governors who signed a letter saying Texas Governor Greg Abbott had the right to install razor wire to defend his state against illegal immigrants crossing the border cross. Jean-Pierre also blasted Abbott for preventing U.S. Customs and Border Protection from doing their work, but he would not say whether President Joe Biden would federalize the National Guard, which Abbott has deployed in the area.
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee, encouraged the nation’s GOP governors to send additional National Guard troops to Texas — with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt saying he “absolutely” would would do – which could raise the stakes. “The way we deal with this is legislative,” Jean Pierre said Friday. “The way we deal with this is for Congress to act.” She suggested that the 25 Republican governors who signed the letter “talk to members of Congress and senators in their states.”
Later during the briefing, she voiced the encouragement again. ‘That’s actually very easy to do. It doesn’t take a lot of work for them to make that request and talk to their members of Congress, who they’re probably talking to about a lot of other issues,” she said, before being interrupted by a reporter.
The journalist had asked whether Biden was considering federalizing National Guard troops after it emerged that Texas violated a federal court order and that more National Guard troops could come at the former president’s urging. “I’m not going to speculate on any actions the president might take,” Jean-Pierre said.
She objected when the reporter, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent, suggested that her recommendation that Republican governors talk to members of Congress was a solution that was “political” in nature. “It is not a political process for a governor in his state to talk to his members of Congress about taking legislative action. That’s not politics, that’s just the right thing to do on behalf of their constituents,” she said.
Jean-Pierre then reiterated the point that Biden has “taken this incredibly seriously, incredibly seriously,” pointing to the draft immigration legislation he released now, more than three years ago, on his Inauguration Day. The press secretary said she believed a bipartisan deal could still be reached on Capitol Hill over the border and financing of Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Senate Republicans at a closed-door meeting that the “politics have changed on this,” referring to the fact that Trump will likely wrap up the Republican Party’s primaries soon . Since Trump’s initial announcement in 2015, one of his top talking points has been border security.
“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell said, according to Punchbowl News. Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah – Trump’s biggest critic of the Republican Party in the US Senate – called Trump’s insistence that lawmakers not immediately set the border “terrible.”
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