Amid House Speaker Mike Johnson's push to send more foreign aid overseas, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Thursday that the United States should be focused on securing its own border instead of Ukraine's.
"Certainly a position I've taken for quite some time is before we send any more money to Ukraine, for example, to secure their border, we have to secure our own," Johnson said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Chris Salcedo Show." "That was, first of all, I think what the American public expects of us. It's a solid position.
"Again, it was [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell [R-Ky.] that entered the secret negotiations that ended up being a debacle that the Democrats used to a galling extent today at the hearings just talking about this bipartisan bill. Let me tell you what they were looking at. Here's a quote from [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-N.Y.] after that debacle was ended. 'We [the Democrats] were playing chess. They [the Republicans] were playing checkers, and we ended up with the Ukraine bill.'
"But here's the real key line: 'We also end up in a much better shape on the border than we were three months ago,'" he continued.
"Now, our Democrat colleagues were talking about, 'Oh, if we would have just done that bipartisan bill, we could have fixed this whole thing.' Why would Schumer think, having not passed that bill, the Democrats are in better shape on the border than they were three months ago? Better shape would be we were securing the border. That's not what they wanted. They wanted political cover and they are using that political cover. They used it today. It was just galling."
After the Senate dismissed both charges of illegal conduct against Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday, Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee conducted a "mini impeachment trial" on Thursday when Mayorkas appeared before the panel to discuss the 2025 fiscal year budget.
Johnson said the solution for the ongoing border crisis "is not to throw more money at DHS [Department of Homeland Security]."
"The solution is to secure the border so we don't have to spend money to apprehend them, to detain them, to pay for sanctuary cities to house them," he said, referring to illegal immigrants. "Again, this is absurd, the path they're [the Biden administration] going down. And what I was trying to point out with Secretary Mayorkas is it didn't have to be this way.
"This is purposeful on their part. This is willful. They want an open border. They caused this and my first question, after I just showed him our chart, showed him the undeniable reality of their catastrophe, was just to ask him a simple question: 'Why did you do it? Why did you open up the border? Why do you want an open border?'"
He continued, "And then my second question was: 'Do you ever go to bed at night, after one of these horrific crimes caused by an illegal immigrant, do you ever regret what you've done? Do you feel no remorse? Do you not feel remorse for the culpability, the complicity you have aiding and abetting these crimes, these murders, these rapes?'
"And his basic response to all of this was, 'Senator, I deny the premise of your question.' We might as well have ... an automaton there. It's just infuriating having that guy sit and try and testify before us."
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