Category: Guest Authors

Harris-Walz Weakest Border Security Ticket In History ?

By Joe Guzzardi

Tradition calls for the presidential candidate to tack to the middle and to choose a vice president who will capture a state which the opposition might otherwise win. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ choice as running mate, does neither. Walz is a less-well-known version of California Governor Gavin Newsom, an ultra-progressive who is aligned with Harris on every radical position she supports. And 1972 was the last time a Republican presidential candidate captured Minnesota, when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern. Although the GOP has made inroads in recent years, the state should remain safely blue.

Among U.S. residents, 71% have neither heard of Walz nor are sure how to evaluate him. But Walz has been in politics since 2006, when he began the first of six terms serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and before being elected and re-elected Minnesota’s governor in 2018 and 2022. Walz’s 26 years in public office should give concerned voters ample insight into his views on their top priority—immigration—and other controversial social issues like his handling of the 2020 BLM riots that cost Minneapolis-St. Paul taxpayers $2 billion.

On open borders and advocacy for more taxpayer funded benefits for illegal aliens, Walz is a carbon copy of Harris. He supports how Biden and Harris have stood idly by and watched millions of unvetted illegal aliens, including at least 99 from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and other nations on the terrorist watch list, cross into the U.S. and disappear into the interior. A sampling of his votes while he was in Congress shows that Walz is all-in on supporting more illegal immigration and providing them with more benefits. Walz was only one of ten co-sponsors on H.R. 2940 which would make it easier for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to waive grounds of inadmissibility related to terrorism. Walz also voted for H.R. 392, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would remove the per-country caps for employment visas and flood the country with even more foreign labor that would take American jobs from U.S. tech workers. As governor, Walz continued and intensified his illegal immigration advocacy. Walz sent a letter to congressional leaders in 2021 which urged them to pass amnesty legislation for “essential workers, Dreamers, Temporary Protected Status holders, and their families.” In the letter, Walz referred to amnesty as “the right thing to do” for the country. He promoted sanctuary state status for Minnesota, the North Star Act, signed a law that gave illegal aliens free public college tuition, and another law that gave drivers licenses to illegal aliens making it easier for them to get to jobs that are illegal for them to hold.

Walz has more heavy baggage that, if it ever becomes nationally known, would hurt Harris’ presidential bid.

      *A pesky 1995 DUI charge has resurfaced. Walz, living in Nebraska, was stopped for driving 96 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. He had a blood alcohol level of 0.128, well over Nebraska’s legal limit of 0.1 Ultimately, after telling several versions of the incident, Walz plead guilty to a reckless driving misdemeanor. His contradictory statements raised questions about his honesty.

     *As the Black Lives Matter riots swept through Minnesota, Walz’s leadership came under intense scrutiny. Critics argue that his failure to call the National Guard immediately allowed the chaos to escalate, and ultimately destroyed neighborhoods and small businesses. Harris’ involvement didn’t help matters; she was busy soliciting bail money for arrested protesters through the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which added fuel to the fire.

     *The governor changed the Minnesota flag to more closely resemble Somalia’s even though Somali gangs had terrorized shoppers at the Mall of America and at other Twin-Cities locations.

     * In January 2023, Walz signed into law Minnesota legislation that includes no limitations on when a woman may end the life of her unborn baby, abortion.

     *In March, 2023, Walz signed an executive order that affirmed gender affirming health care for Minnesota’s LGBTQ community.

     * Signed a bill that took effect on January 1 that required public schools to provide free menstrual products in boys and girls bathrooms. Co-sponsor Sandra Feist hailed Walz’s bill and said, “Not all students who menstruate are female.”

     *Finally, Walz signed an executive order ensuring that Minnesota children have access to irreversible transgender surgeries and sterilizing hormone treatments, which proponents call “gender-affirming care.”

Walz and Harris’ immigration and societal perspectives are far outside of the mainstream but, to date, the complicit media has kept their extreme policies under wraps. Since her coronation, Harris has gone seventeen days without taking a single question, a strategy that’s been working for her. A poll taken just after Biden dropped out, for example, showed that voters trusted her and Trump equally to bring down prices. She’s avoided, in the public’s eye at least, being tied to Biden’s inflationary policies, his open border agenda and warmongering administration. In Harris’ Philadelphia speech and Walz’s acceptance, neither mentioned the words “inflation” or “border.”  Her website is a fundraising vehicle that offers no policy proposals from which voters may review and draw their own conclusions.

Critics claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is the most radical in presidential history, a conclusion that well-informed voters may disagree with but should decide for themselves before they cast their votes.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Harris-Walz Weakest Border Security Ticket In History ?

The Kamala Conundrum

By Joe Guzzardi

Throughout her career, Kamala Harris has benefited from the support of friends in high places. Michelle and Barack Obama’s recent endorsement of Harris for president, despite Barack’s original fear that she couldn’t beat Donald Trump, is the latest example. An insider revealed that Obama withheld his Harris endorsement because “he knows she can’t win,” and he said that, in Obama’s opinion, “she can’t navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”

The Obamas’ backing gives Harris’ campaign a needed boost. But, looking back, Harris’ political ascendancy is directly tied to her two-year dalliance with Willie Brown in the 1990s while he was Speaker of the California Assembly. The speakership is one of the state’s most powerful positions whichcontrols the legislative flow of bills that either do or don’t reach the governor’s desk. Married but separated, Brown was twice Harris’ age; he was 60 and she, 29. Brown appointed Harris to two coveted state panels—the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission—that together reportedly earned her more than $400,000 over five years, $825,000 today.

But Brown’s most valuable favors were to connect Harris to the Democrat party’s elites and deep-pocketed donors. Brown also actively promoted Harris’ campaigns, first for San Francisco attorney general, then California’s attorney general, and finally the U.S. senate. Days after Senator Barbara Boxer announced that she would not seek re-election in 2016, Harris jumped into the fray. Antonio Villaraigosa, a prominent, popular Hispanic politician and former Los Angeles Mayor, hinted that he was poised to enter the race also. But Brown cut Villaraigosa off before he could get started. With endorsements from Brown, Boxer, Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Governor Jerry Brown, Harris cruised over Orange County’s U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, winning 66 percent of the vote.

Immediately after her victory in one-party California, the always-friendly media began touting her as 2020 presidential timber. Harris’ announcement that she would compete for the presidential nomination originally generated enthusiasm, but the excitement soon fizzled out; Harris’ campaign was a complete bust. Her abrasive personality created constant staff turnover, and Harris dropped out without winning a single delegate. She blamed her failure on the lack of financial resources, which translates to an inability to convince donors that she would be a winner. Looking back over her record, analysts conclude that, on her own, she has never won anything and least of all the 2024 Democratic primary.

Harris is in the midst of a lovefest with the media which is furiously withholding the truth about her radical left record which, according to GovTrack. earned her the dubious most liberal senator title—further left than even Senator Bernie Sanders  and Elizabeth Warren. Shortly after Harris entered the presidential race by default, GovTrack took its ranking down, one of the many coverups that will mark her presidential quest.

GovTrack’s trickery aside, the Internet is packed with her radical statements that include endorsing the American Families Plan, a nearly $2 trillion pre-K childcare package, forgiving student debt, ending fracking, pushing climate change—she was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal—offering free four-year public college education for low-and middle income American students, continued funding for the unwinnable Ukraine-Russia war,  providing Medicare for all including illegal aliens, decriminalizing illegal immigration, abolishing the police, maintaining sanctuary cities’ status, “re-imagining” ICE, ending cash bail and eliminating the death penalty. While she likes to portray herself as tough on crime, four months after Harris was sworn in as AG, gang member David Hill shot and killed police Officer Isaac Espinoza in April 2004. Harris declined to charge the shooter with a capital offense, thus sparing him from the death penalty. Her decision rankled California’s political leadership including California’s senior senator Dianne Feinstein who called for Hill’s execution.

Harris, a San Francisco progressive, will have to do some slick talking to wiggle out of her advocacy for those costly and, among the majority, unpopular political proposals. On immigration and the border, however, Harris has no escape route. To make Harris more palatable to middle-of-the-road voters, her supporters insist that she was never the “border czar.” They falsely claim that Biden tasked her with identifying the root causes for the invasion. As the old political axiom goes, when candidates are explaining, they are losing. The indisputable fact remains that Harris never went to the border, had unproductive meetings with Northern Triangle leaders, and stood by to watch illegal immigration overwhelm major U.S. metropolises with murder, mayhem and fentanyl deaths. The root cause for illegal aliens’ journey north is Biden’s and Harris’ refusal to enforce immigration law.

Even conservative media has done a dismal job reporting on the criminality inherent in open borders. To allow and encourage illegal immigration, as Biden and Harris have, violates the Constitution and is an impeachable offense. During the three and a half years of keeping the border open to a global influx of illegal aliens and rewarding them with work permission and other perks, Biden, Harris and Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas have initiated America’s demographic overhaul which would continue with a four-year Harris term. Harris recommends that, to solve the border fiasco, illegal aliens residing in the U.S. be given “a meaningful path to citizenship” —an amnesty which would mean more chain migration. Princeton University scholars calculated that when immigrants become citizens, they petition on average three family members to join them in the U.S. Amnestied illegal aliens will either grow their existing families or start new ones-which means more urban sprawl, more natural resources depleted, and more competition for affirmative benefits.

Polling consistently shows that immigration is voters’ top concern. Harris’ election would mean four more years of the same open borders and the associated violent crime that has plagued the nation since Biden entered the White House.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

The Kamala Conundrum

The Kamala Conundrum

The Kamala Conundrum

Trump-Vance Must Restore Fairness To Betrayed American Workers

By Joe Guzzardi

The Donald J. Trump-J.D. Vance ticket gives promise to working Americans who the Biden administration has maligned through its open border agenda, and improper granting of parole with work authorization to millions of illegal immigrants. The legal and illegal immigrants that have arrived since President Joe Biden’s first days in the White House have dominated job creation in the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Center for Immigration Studies Steve Camarota’s research into jobs data found that since 2019’s fourth quarter, the period just before COVID-19 devastated the U.S. economy, 2.7 million more people are working. The raw statistics give false credence to the Biden administration’s boast that the U.S. economy is strong.

But immigrants, not U.S. workers, led in job gains totals, an important fact omitted from the White House’s glowing economic press releases. Simply stated, since 2019, all the net job growth has gone to immigrants. The number of working immigrants since 2019 is up by 2.9 million, while 183,000 fewer U.S. citizens were employed during the same period.

The GOP ticket—Trump and Vance—have an opportunity to right three decades of wrongs perpetrated against American workers. Low-skilled Americans are forced to compete with under-educated illegal aliens for entry level jobs that would help them support their families and get a foot in the labor market, essential for moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Black American workers are the biggest victims of mass immigration, and not only on the hiring line. Kathleen Wells, Black America for Immigration Reform’ s Executive Director, observed that in New York City, America’s most expensive city in which to rent a hotel room, 135 of its 700 hotels provide taxpayer funded housing to illegal immigrants. Prepaid debit cards add to the generous benefits package available to illegal immigrants, but not to black Americans. Similar injustices play out across America—in Chicago, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Portland.

Skilled U.S. workers are not immune from foreign labor job displacement. A wide variety of employment-based visas provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of professional employees that will work in tech, accounting, and education. The most commonly used visas are the H-1B, the J-1, and the L-1. The overseas employees—read, cheaper— take well-paying, white-collar jobs from more experienced American workers.

The time is overdue for American workers’ resumes that reflect their skills and experiences to return to their rightful position at the top of employers’ inboxes and not be cast aside in favor of candidates that unscrupulous employers will hire for the lowest wage. Trump and Vance are aware that new jobs must be filled by U.S. citizens. In his GOP convention address, Vance reminded the audience that he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”

Continuing, Vance said:” When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico. When I was a sophomore in high school that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart deal that destroyed even more good American middle-class jobs.” For more than a quarter of a century, the craven, D.C. privileged has done the bidding of donors and consistently spurned working Americans in pursuit of their own narrow self-interests. Biden may be gone but whoever replaces him at the top of the Democratic ticket will have the same global agenda. Trump and Vance can end the harm done to American workers; reversing the anti-American sentiment must be their first priority.

Monday, January 20, 2025, Inauguration Day, is the time to for Trump and Vance to begin to keep their campaign pledges to U.S. workers.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more thirty years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Trump-Vance Must Restore Fairness To Betrayed American Workers

Lowering Political Temp Not Hard

By Joe Guzzardi

Every day for the last ten years, I’ve given daily thanks that I grew up when I did, in the 1950s, and where I did, Los Angeles County, at the time one of the nation’s leading agricultural producers. Those wonderful days are long-gone and will never return. Compared to today and considering the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, I have difficulty believing that such a time and place ever existed in America. I’ve lived through many presidential elections where hostility between the Republican and Democratic candidates ran high. But the rhetoric that one candidate and his media supporters directed at the opposition never reached the level that the Democrats have attained against Trump. Through his infamous Daisy ad, 1964 incumbent Lyndon Johnson inferred that his opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, would drop a nuclear bomb to end the Vietnam War. Goldwater’s name didn’t appear in the ad. Johnson’s campaign portrayed Goldwater as an unstable extremist, not only because of his Vietnam position but also for his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and for his support of a voluntary Social Security system. In private, Johnson called Goldwater “nutty as a fruitcake” while, at the same time, he projected himself “as this source of order and calm and composure” who would “keep everyone safe.” Johnson didn’t publicly direct personal attacks on Goldwater’s character.

Roughly 40 million Americans saw the “Daisy” ad the first time it aired and that, thanks to replays, 100 million Americans had viewed it by the end of the first week it aired. The spot was a long way from Eisenhower’s 1952 and 1956 tame “I like Ike” spots. In television’s ancient days, only three channels existed, ABC, CBS and NBC. To get the same market penetration today, advertising experts estimate that television stations would have to show Johnson’s ad 1,000 times. Because of lingering sympathy for the assassinated John F. Kennedy, Johnson was considered a shoo-in. But he exceeded expectations. Johnson won the election in a blowout, securing 61 percent of the popular vote and losing only Goldwater’s home state of Arizona and five southern states. The Democrats also gained congressional seats which gave Johnson a mandate to push forward with his war on poverty and his Great Society agenda

Johnson’s success encouraged more aggressive political spots, but again they centered on issues, not personalities. In 1972, with the nation’s citizenry still conflicted about Vietnam, President Richard Nixon’s campaign produced the “McGovern Defense” ad which pictured the Democratic challenger as weak on national defense. Nixon won in a landslide. In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran on “Morning in America” which promised voters that his administration would end rampant crime, high taxes, and double-digit inflation. Reagan’s victory over the incumbent Carter was an electoral vote rout. He tallied 489 votes to Carter’s 49. These were victories achieved on policy, not character assassination.

Significant parallels exist between Reagan and Trump. Both were outsiders, not part of the D.C. establishment, and Republicans. When inaugurated, Reagan was two weeks shy of his 70^th birthday, the oldest elected president until Trump, age 70 years, 220 days defeated Hillary Clinton. Both barely survived when would-be assassins shot them. Four months after Reagan’s inauguration, a deranged John Hinckley, Jr, shot the president in the chest.

The presidential elections I’ve observed have been largely devoid of the vicious invective that has been a cornerstone of Biden’s administration and especially his re-election campaign. Long-time observers of Washington are not surprised at the assassination attempt. Trump’s rivals have tried to neutralize him through impeachment and lawfare. For months, politicians, the media and talking heads have escalated reckless rhetoric. That includes claims that Trump is an authoritarian fascist, determined to kill democracy, unleash death squads and make homosexuals and reporters “disappear.”  The media routinely suggests that Trump is a Super-Hitler, the embodiment of everything evil. He must be stopped, demand his detractors. Even Biden’s most patently false statements about the border go unchallenged. At his July 11 press conference, Biden said: “Working with Mexico, border encounters have gone down over 50%. The current level is lower today than when Trump left office.” The truth: in June, CBP encountered 84,000 illegal aliens; when Trump left office, the total was 75,000. But Biden’s raw numbers are only part of the border story. Biden’s totals exclude illegal aliens who entered via the non-congressionally approved CBP One app, and were then paroled, also illegally. As the illegal aliens are processed, they receive notices to appear which are mostly disregarded. Yet reporters didn’t push back on Biden’s false narrative, even slightly.

Biden has stoked rage with his irresponsible oratory. In 2022, Biden delivered a vicious speech in Independence Hall where he vilified 50% of the nation, Trump supporters, as enemies of the people. He said: “MAGA forces are determined to take the country backward…Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy.” Biden recently referenced the Independence Hall speech and has embraced the claims that 2024 could be the nation’s last democratic election. Instead of outlining his vision for America’s future, he’s unrelentingly maligned Trump. The suspected assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was 20 and had been listening to anti-Trump hysteria for half his adult life.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr, no fan of his former boss, said “the Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy. He is not.” Toning things down wouldn’t be hard. Journalists should adhere to their profession’s standards of fairness and balance. Candidates for high office should tell the public what their vision for the future is and how they would achieve it. Nearly four months remain until the November election, time enough to change course and embark on civility while campaigning.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Lowering Political Temp Not Hard

Lowering Political Temp Not Hard