Sen. Murphy: ‘The President Doesn’t Have the Legal Authority … to Control the Border’

IGNATIUS: “Senator Murphy, David Ignatius in Washington. Congratulations on getting this bipartisan deal set in the Senate. If it ends up, getting turned down in the House and being seemingly stopped in its tracks, do you think that President Biden should just try to take this issue away from the Republicans who seem to be playing politics with it, then use every bit of his executive authority to address the border crisis on his own, say, basically, won’t pass the legislation? OK, I’m going to do it myself. Would that be a good strategy for him?”
MURPHY: “Well, here’s the problem, David. The president can’t do this by himself. The president doesn’t have the legal authority without additional legislation to control the border and fix the broken asylum system in the way that needs to be done. And this is part of the fiction that gets perpetuated on the American public by Republicans. Now, they wanted to pass border legislation last year. In fact, it was so important to them in the House of Representatives that they named it H.R. 2, it was the second bill they introduced. But as soon as it became clear that bipartisan border reform legislation might pass, Republicans in the House started screaming, no the president doesn’t need any new laws. He has all the authority he needs. That’s just not true. We know that because Donald Trump couldn’t do a much better job of controlling the border. Presentations were in a 10, year high before Covid. And we also know that without legislative reform to the asylum system, without an infusion of resources, trying to clear the backlog, it’s still going to take 10 years to process an asylum claim. So no, we need legislation. Republicans know we need legislation, and many of them are trying to stop this legislation because they know the president can’t fix it on his own, and they know that the border will still be chaotic without us passing the bill.”