Democratic Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer has a clear choice in front of him: shut down the border or shut down the government.
The senior senator from New York thinks he can “blame” President Trump for a government shutdown, but he fails to realize that Americans care more about closing the border than closing the government.
Having elected a president who vowed to “build the wall” and told pollsters they want a wall, the majority of Americans will cheer President Trump for standing firm and jeer Schumer for trying to score cheap political points at the expense of our security.
It is just common sense: an open border is like an open door, inviting criminals and freeloaders to help themselves. Since he can’t (or refuses to) hear anything President Trump says, Schumer should listen to McGruff the Crime Dog.
The facts are incontrovertible: illegal crossings dropped by 90% or more along stretches of our southern border where a wall was built.
It is also a fact that Customs and Border Protection apprehended 17,000 criminals at the border last year. They also stopped an average of ten suspects on the terrorist watch list every day.
The American people do not support unlimited, unregulated immigration. They do not want to foot the bill for the 58 percent of non-citizen households that are on welfare. The president has pledged to support Medicaid and the reality is non-citizens are using the program at more than double the rate of native-born Americans.
The first Schumer Shutdown saw the Senate Democrats put law-breaking foreigners ahead of law-abiding Americans. They learned that was not a winning political ploy.
Now, in Schumer Shutdown 2.0, the crafty senator leading is leading minions into battle to protect the paychecks of Washington bureaucrats rather than the security of American families.
When President Trump said he would be proud to shut down the government for border security, Schumer replied without missing a beat, “We believe you shouldn’t shut it down.”
Let that sink in: Schumer would keep the border open and endanger us all in order to protect a miniscule number of government employees. I would not bet on Chuck in a poker tournament. President Trump holds the high cards.
Chuck Schumer and his swamp-dwelling kin see a government shutdown as the end of the world because they think the government and the nation are the same thing.
The American people know our country is more than the government.
Previous generations of Americans stormed the beaches of Normandy and Anzio to protect our country and our way of life.
This generation will stomach putting a temporary hold on the paychecks of some Washington chair-warmers if that is what it takes to secure the border.
The American people know that if we do not have a border, we do not have a nation.
And if we do not have a nation, we will not need a government anyway.
Shut the border or shut the government, Sen. Schumer. The choice is yours.
Curtis Ellis is senior policy adviser with America First Policies. He was a senior policy adviser with the Donald J. Trump campaign.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.