WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader John Thune told – News exclusively last week that President Donald Trump’s successes at the U.S. border with Mexico have already been “staggering” and “mind-blowing.”
Thune’s comments came during a long-form on-camera interview with – News taped last week in the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC. Several other parts of the interview—from the Majority Leader’s timeline for Trump’s tax relief plan to his views on Democrats’ meltdowns to his work on confirming Trump’s nominees—have already been published. But in this final piece, which includes the full unedited interview, Thune is particularly praising of Trump’s work on the border.
“I think you have to—what he’s had so far, it’s hard to characterize it as anything but just a staggering success,” Thune said. “It is—you look at what they were under Biden a year ago, you’re talking about 10,000 or 11,000 a day and now we’re down to 200 a day, it is almost mind-blowing in terms of how much difference the leadership of President and the White House has made over Biden’s open borders policy. But he’s going to need to continue that and needs the resources for the Border Patrol agents; he’s going to need money for the wall; he’s going to need money for detention beds, and all of those things needed to continue to secure the border. But you can see what a difference leadership makes in the short amount of time he’s had to work on it.”
Thune added that Senate Republicans intend to be “partners” with Trump on securing the border even more, and to make sure he has extra resources to do so. He promised a “generational investment in border security” is coming in the Trump agenda plan that the Congress is working on right now.
“We are going to be partners with him. In the reconciliation bill, we’re working on—we have a generational investment in border security that the president will be able to use as a tool to continue to get that job done,” Thune said.
In addition to the immigration provisions in the forthcoming bill, Thune also said the Congress intends to give Trump more resources to expand energy production in the U.S. He ripped Senate Democrats for unanimously voting against President Trump’s emergency declaration on energy production and noted that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are preparing to give Trump lots more resources to keep expanding energy production in the United States.
“It’s another example of how hostage the Democrats are being held to their far-left agenda. Voting against an energy emergency in this country when we clearly have an energy emergency—you look at just as an example electricity, you have artificial intelligence, you got data centers, you got crypto mines, all of these things are incredibly power-intensive, and then of course the Democrats wanted to have everybody already driving electric vehicles,” Thune said. “We don’t have enough energy in this country. Oil and gas, I would say any American form of energy, there’s more of a conversation around nuclear again, obviously there are renewable energy sources, but we ought to be for all things that are American energy. What reconciliation will give us an opportunity to do is again make clear to the American people that we view America as not only being energy independent but energy dominant and to take advantage of the rich supplies we have in this country to fuel our economy but also to help some of our allies around the world who have become way too dependent upon countries like Russia and China for their energy needs. We’re looking at opening up areas of development—the president has already done some of that through executive order—we want to codify some of those things and just make sure we as a country are doing everything we can to make sure our people in the United States of America are never getting in a position where a country, particularly an adversarial country, where we become dependent upon them for our energy. Then hopefully we produce not just enough for our own population but maybe enough to help other places around the world.”
In addition to all of these things, Thune highlighted Senate GOP efforts to roll back Biden regulations using a mechanism called the Congressional Review Act (CRA).
“The Biden administration, as you could expect, characteristically relied heavily on the use of regulations to implement their agenda,” Thune said in the interview taped last week. “A lot of their agenda of course was the Green New Deal. It was a lot of their climate agenda. But what it did was put this huge wet blanket on top of our economy. It drives up costs for consumers. It makes it more expensive for businesses to invest in this country. It gives them all kinds of new rules and regulations and red tape to comply with so a lot of that, there is a provision in law that was added back in the 1990s that allows you to–when an administration overreaches in an area of regulations–Congress can through a resolution of disapproval pull that back. So we’re doing that with a whole bunch of Biden-era regulations and there’s a certain amount of time in which you have to do it, and we hit that clock next week. We’re doing a bunch of them this week, and a bunch of them next week, to do as many as we can before the clock runs out. But in the Biden administration, the heavy hand of regulation was felt everywhere. But certainly, probably most notably in the energy sector of our economy but also too in the everyday lives of average people. There were so many of these regulations that just piled on more cost. People are ready to be liberated from that so we’ve had lots of success. The House has moved a lot of them. We’ve moved a lot of them. The president has already signed a bunch into law, and we’re going to give him a bunch more to sign.”
