GOP Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma recently faced harsh criticism for his stance on the Republican effort to impeach Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Borrowing language from House Speaker Mike Johnson, Lankford indicated the initiative would be “dead on arrival” when it reached the Senate.
“It’ll fail in the Senate. If I can use the house term. It’ll be dead on arrival when it comes over. But it’ll still be the same policy even if America’s left. We’re gonna have the same result because we got the same president who’s drafting the policy just like we did under Trump,” Lankford said when being interviewed by the press.
Republicans have been quick to denounce his stance on the Mayorkas impeachment, claiming he is not remaining true to the interests of conservative voters by taking substantive action on the ongoing border crisis. “Lankford is a perfect example of a Democrat in GOP clothing. How many more are there? These folks for years have been two faced, telling their constituents one thing and then cutting deals with Democrats that do just the opposite,” one person commented under a video of Lankford’s comments on X.
Sen. Lankford has also received criticism from his party for his role in negotiating the Senate border security bill. Many have condemned the recent piece of legislation from the upper chamber for prioritizing foreign interests, such as Israel and Ukraine, over the southern border.
However, Lankford has responded to the criticism targeted at him, asserting that the bill will actually improve conditions at the border and “flip the script” on Biden’s current immigration policies. “Are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December?” Lankford recently questioned. “Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things or are we going to actually address and change as many things as we can?”
Despite Lankford’s intentions, the Oklahoma GOP voted to condemn the senator over his role in the bill negotiations with Democrats. “‘Resolution Condemning & Censoring Senator Lankford’s Open Border Deal’ as approved by the OKGOP State Committee members on January 27, 2024,” Oklahoma senator Dusty Deevers tweeted in late January.
Despite the critical feedback from other Republicans in his state, Lankford has maintained that the bipartisan negotiations were the best “shot” at taking meaningful action to secure the southern border. He suggested that the GOP is unwilling to sit down and have a discussion on ways to take action at the border.
“If we have the shot — and it’s amazing to me, if I go back two months ago and say we had the shot under a Democrat president to dramatically increase detention beds, deportation flights, lock 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 said. “And now no one actually wants to be able to fix it, says, ‘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 and leave it open or actually leave it closed?” he continued.
Note: The featured image is a screenshot from the embedded video.
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