Vance’s debate showing highlights where the Right is heading, and what it must leave behind
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It was knockout. When Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz met in New York for last week’s vice-presidential debate, Vance wiped the floor with a clearly overmatched Walz, fighting and winning even on issues typically considered favorable to the Democrats. His answer on climate, particularly in the wake of Hurricane Helene, showed a mastery of both the policy and the politics, offering a compelling case for the GOP ticket on an issue where Republicans tend to dissemble. Vance showed the wisdom of his choice for Donald Trump’s vice president, ably communicating the intricacies of complex issues like immigration in a medium not known for substantive policy discussions.
Walz, on the other hand struggled to coherently answer even the most basic questions. His disquisition on where he was during the Tiananmen Square Massacre was the most egregious example: A two-and-a-half-minute ramble, the ultimate thesis of which was an admission that he wasn’t truthful which, at best, indicates he didn’t do his homework ahead of the debate. His dishonesty had, after all, been in the news for days! Secretary Buttigieg was supposed to be preparing him!
Luckily for Walz, he did not have to count solely on the Secretary of Transportation. Walz was able to draw on the endorsements of GOP hand-me-downs like former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in a—misguided—appeal for credibility. Old Right tactical blunders provided the talking points, with the supposedly conservative Lankford immigration bill, supported by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal, featuring prominently as Walz’s only defense of the administration’s border policies, which Vance repeatedly (and rightly) torched throughout the discussion.
The difference between the performance of Senate leadership throughout the 118th Congress and Vance’s on the debate stage highlights the fundamental tension between Old Right elites and the GOP electorate. Vance’s masterclass performance, particularly on immigration, demonstrated that he is the future of the Right, and Senate Republican leadership’s ill-fated decision to attempt yet another immigration “grand bargain” has demonstrated that they should, as swiftly as possible, become its past.
First, a recap of this debacle. The U.S.’s southern border has been a catastrophe since the very beginning of the Biden-Harris administration. Since 2020, the U.S.-Mexico border has seen a record number of illegal crossings in no small part due to the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to rescind the Trump administration’s executive orders.
At the beginning 2024, Republican leadership attempted, yet again, to reach a grand bargain on immigration, ignoring both the peril and lack of appetite for such a deal. Leader McConnell designated Senator Lankford to lead negotiations with the Democrats with the goal of producing a compromise bill.
There were several problems with this strategy, and they were obvious from the start. Of course, there is the fact that this effort was directly negotiating against the strong House Republican position already offered in HR-2. Though flawed in that it failed to include mandatory E-Verify, HR-2 at least addressed abuse within the asylum system, the Biden admin’s expansive use of humanitarian parole, and would have expanded the border wall.
HR-2 was a consensus, conservative package that, given the political challenges created by the disastrous Biden-Harris administration’s policies on immigration, should have been the beginning and the end of any negotiation on the topic. Sadly, leadership could not leave well enough alone, and attempted to push forward the legislation.
Certainly, abandoning HR-2 was a poor decision, but the most fatal flaw in Senate leadership’s plan was a fundamental one: whom they intended to negotiate with. Democrats in the administration, the Senate, the House, and their surrounding clique of NGO’s, had staked the position that any form of border enforcement is a racist abomination. Naturally, a midpoint between the Republican leadership offering and the Dems’ open-border maximalist position would not be a very good bill.
And it was not. The end result of these negotiations was a bill that had a litany of problems and was riddled with non-starters for conservatives. Most egregiously, while it gave the president supposedly new removal power, that authority didn’t kick in until there were an average of 4,000 illegal crossings per week. It didn’t mandate use of that power until an average weekly threshold of 5,000 illegal border crossings had been reached. While that figure may not seem damning on its face, it would, in policy practice, conceivably allow a floor of 1.825 million illegal immigrants crossing the border before an executive action would be required—150% of the total illegal crossings for the full year in 2019.
The bill would also exacerbate, not fix, “catch-and-release.” It would have given the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security power to parole illegal immigrants into the country based on “exigent medical circumstance” or “an urgent humanitarian reason pertaining directly to an individual alien, according to criteria” determined by the secretary. Given the current DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, is presently being impeached in part because of his abuse of his parole authority, it is unquestionably unwise to entrust him with making these determinations.
Taken together, this was, predictably, unacceptable to the vast majority of GOP senators, Trump, and anybody else even remotely concerned with stemming the tide of illegal immigration. The fallout was so bad, McConnell abandoned the effort barely two days after the text of the bill was released. When put up for a vote as a standalone measure, the bill went down in flames, with both McConnell and Lankford voting against the very deal they had attempted to strike.
Since then, the bill has been resurrected as a talking point for the Harris-Walz campaign, and they have attempted to use its existence to cynically shift the responsibility of the fiasco at the border to Trump, repeating the claim at both the vice-presidential and presidential debates.
This cheap talking point of course does not change the facts. The Biden-Harris administration is to blame for the present border crisis. They rescinded the Trump executive order declaring the border a national emergency on their first day in office, and they released into the interior of the country millions of people just on their word that they needed asylum.
These actions are all indicative of a radical, out-of-touch, elite unconcerned with the situation at the border. It is only the polls—not the violence, human misery, or failure to uphold the rule of law—that forced them to change their tune. To be clear, every single one of these actions transpired before Senate Republican leadership elected to begin negotiations. The Democrat’s priorities have been obvious, and taking serious action on illegal immigration is clearly not one of them. Unfortunately, the GOP Old Guard’s number one priority is playacting at statesmanship, which suits the Democrats just fine.
These days, Neocons are well established parts of the Democratic coalition, but other components of the Old Right have stumbled in entirely by accident. Incompetence at this level is indistinguishable from malice, and conservatives should no longer accept a leadership so out of step with their priorities.
After this election, McConnell is stepping down. Should he be replaced by someone who will make these same mistakes, it would be a disaster. Conservatives can and should demand a leader who is capable of driving the Trump-Vance agenda in the Senate, not one who will undermine those policies either out of incompetence or in service of the Chamber of Commerce.
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