How Do They Still Have Jobs?

“By any normal definition of the role of a Cabinet member, Secretary Mayorkas would have either resigned voluntarily or have had his resignation requested by the President.”

On May 7th, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) spoke with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan at the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum. The conversation touched on several topics pertinent to Senator Sinema’s priorities, but immigration became a primary focus, particularly given that the interview took place just days before May 11th, the date the Biden administration plans to lift Title 42, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) era policy that enabled the United States to expel approximately 2.8 million illegal entrants into the nation. Now, with the COVID-19 national emergency coming to a close, Title 42 will expire as well. So with public health no longer citable as a reason for turning away entrants at the Southern Border, many forecasts anticipate dramatically heightened levels of illegal border crossings in the wake of that policy’s expiration.

Brennan began the immigration portion of her conversation with Senator Sinema by describing the situation at the Southern Border as “the hemisphere’s worst refugee crisis” before asking the Senator about the status of potential legislation seeking to address the crisis: “Is it simply a political reality that you can’t get comprehensive reform done? You have to chip away at this piecemeal?”

In the course of her answer to Brennan’s questioning about immigration, Senator Sinema acknowledged the difficulty in achieving the requisite number of votes for any immigration-related legislation to pass: “I don’t think you can get agreement on a restroom break by next Thursday. The United States Senate is functioning at a fairly dysfunctional level right now.” Most notably, however, she singled out the Biden administration for her view that the executive branch has poorly prepared for the anticipated migrant surge, comments that would later draw criticism from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. As Senator Sinema sees it, “The Biden administration had two years to prepare for this and did not do so. And our state is going to bear the brunt and migrants will be in crisis as soon as next week. It will be a humanitarian crisis because we are not prepared.”