Yeah, eliminating DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ salary and the government shutdown Rep. Chip Roy also wants will solve the border crisis. Sure it will.
Roy told Fox News host Charles Payne, “If there’s an individual who’s not doing their job or that we think we ought to have a pointed response to their failures, their inability to actually follow the law, then we can zero out their salary.”
“We need to use the power of the purse more broadly,” Roy added. “The founders gave it to us, importantly for the House of Representatives to be able to check the executive branch.”
For emotional points, Roy spoke of “sitting at a roundtable with mothers who lost their children to fentanyl.” No mention of sitting with mothers who have lost their children to gun violence or lack of health insurance. Apparently, child deaths only matter when they’re caused by undocumented immigrants!
“We’re dealing with the chaos in South Texas, the ranches,” Roy said. “We saw an 11-year-old boy die in a bus wreck two weeks ago in Ohio by somebody who was let through by the Biden administration, let into the United States. 1.6 million gotaways, we found ammo and weapons in South Texas just this last weekend. Our country’s under assault, this administration knows it, they don’t care.”
So, what’s Roy’s plan to fix it? Shutting down the government. “They got another thing coming,” he said, about agreeing to a continuing resolution to keep the government running. “We’re not going to do that, and Republicans need to wake up and fight.”
President Biden’s 2024 budget proposed a nearly $800 million increase for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE. It would fund the hiring of 350 more Border Patrol agents, more money for border technology and to combat fentanyl trafficking. In other words, the things the GOP wants. But going along with it would not score MAGA political points.
Not that Payne brought any of that up. He was worried the Republicans wouldn’t be tough enough. “I suspect right now, 90% of our audience is standing up, cheering the television, some probably broke out tambourines,” he said, “but there’s the thing: Your leadership just never comes through on this kind of stuff. … I love hearing what you have to say but can you convince your own party to be tough?”
“We’re working on it” Roy assured Payne and the viewers. He announced that he voted against the debt ceiling deal that avoided economic catastrophe. “We fought it, we actually shut the House down for a week in response, trying to send a signal we’re not gonna tolerate that again,” Roy declared proudly.
Now, he wants to shut down the entire government. “There is a large block of us. You are going to address the border or you’re going to have a massive fight on your hands in the House of Representatives,” he threatened. And it’s no big deal to shut down the government – because COVID! “For everybody hand wringing about a government shutdown for two or three weeks in October, how about the fact that we allowed them to shut down the entire American economy, shut down our schools, put our kids in the corner, force them into masks, and they want to hand wring over two weeks of the freaking government shutting down? Come on.” Never mind that the U.S. economy would lose an estimated $1.8 billion a week during a shutdown.” Just think of the MAGA points Roy and his buddies would get sticking it to the libs! Not that Payne brought up the economic damage of shutting down the government.
Payne did mention that Mayorkas has a net worth of $8 million. So even though cutting his salary to just about nothing would not cause the hardship Roy obviously hopes for, Payne said, “I love the idea of us, the taxpayer, not paying officials who are not doing their jobs. … How can we broaden this out?”
Roy didn’t answer the question other than to further attack Mayorkas, saying he should be impeached, and that “the entire agency” should lose their salaries, too.
Payne closed by saying it was “fantastic” speaking with Roy and urged him to “keep pushing.”
You can watch Roy’s performative brand of “legislating” below, from the September 6, 2023 Your World. Maybe he’s the one who should be defunded and fired.