Crenshaw won’t support ‘crazy’ GOP border legislation that ‘doesn’t address the cartels’
Julia Johnson
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EXCLUSIVE — Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) won’t be supporting what’s been dubbed the “strongest border security package” that Congress has ever considered when it comes to the floor for a vote next month.
The Texas Republican says the long-awaited Republican border security bill doesn’t fully address one critical problem: Mexican drug cartels.
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Crenshaw told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview on Friday that he is a “no” on the legislation in its current form.
“It’s not good right now,” he said. “I cannot take a border bill seriously that doesn’t address the cartels.
“It doesn’t talk about the cartels,” he added. “So the people who have operational control of the border, the people who are killing 80,000 Americans a year by trafficking fentanyl through the border — are completely unaddressed in this bill. This is something we’ve brought up to leadership many times over the past few months as they’ve gone over this.”
House Republicans promised to address record illegal border crossings and apprehensions as well as the flow of fentanyl into the country if they won the majority in the 2022 midterm elections. And almost five months into the 118th Congress, they are prepared to bring a bill on border security to the floor.
On Thursday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told reporters that several bills finally passed this month by the GOP-led House Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Foreign Affairs committees after months of infighting between Republicans — particularly between some of Crenshaw’s Texas colleagues — would be brought to the House floor for a vote in May.
According to Scalise, the group of bills is the “strongest border security package that Congress has ever taken” up.
“We’re going to bring a border security package and pass it through this House of Representatives,” Scalise said. “And we challenge President Biden to work with us to solve this problem.”
Crenshaw did concede that “there is one provision in this bill that talks about the cartels.” He claimed that the provision, however, would request that the Biden administration conduct a study on designating the cartels as terrorist organizations.
He said this is a “terrible idea.” According to Crenshaw, the House Republicans should not be asking the Biden administration to draw its own conclusions on the cartels. By designating the cartels as such, Crenshaw said, “You create an asylum claim for millions of people who are even close to these terrorist organizations that would make our immigration crisis worse.”
The Texan and former U.S. Navy SEAL officer said he isn’t alone in his opposition to the bill. Without naming names, he said: “I’m not the only member who thinks that there’s still some work to do.”
However, Crenshaw is confident he and other holdouts will be able to reach an agreement if GOP leadership is open to making a deal.
“We can easily get to ‘yes’ on this,” he said. “But there’s got to be a couple very, very easy changes.”
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Legislation already exists that can “easily be inserted into this,” he said. This legislation would provide for “bigger penalties for cartels, using a lot of the same language — the legal language that you would use if you did designate an organization as a terrorist organization,” as well as “going after their finances, going after people who aid and abet them, sanctions, things like that.”
With these adjustments, the congressman said, “We’ll get to yes.”
Asked how the House Republican leadership responded to his concern about the lack of provisions on the cartels, he said, “Well, they act surprised, even though we’ve been talking about it for months.
“We’ve told them what our priorities are when it comes to the border bill. I’m not the only — I’m not like alone on an anthill here. There’s a lot of members who are with me on this,” Crenshaw added.
According to him, several members who had been working on border security for years “just weren’t really consulted” about the contents of the bill.
“That’s not a way to do business. I thought we were promised something different,” he said.
He additionally said that the members who did get a say were “the ones who made noise and threatened the leader. That’s unfortunately what they’re responding to,” he claimed.
“I’ve always been a friend. I’ve always been somebody that just does it the right way and comes up with the good ideas, actually does the hard work, writes the legislation, works for the conference,” he said.
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“Actually, those are the kinds of people they tend to ignore,” he continued.
The Washington Examiner contacted the offices of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Scalise for a response.