Lankford, James

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    Fact-Checking Claims That Senate Bill Allows 5,000 Unauthorized Immigrants a Day

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    Republican critics are misrepresenting one provision of a bipartisan deal to suggest that it permits 5,000 illegal crossings a day.Republican critics have quickly twisted one element of a bipartisan compromise bill unveiled on Sunday to misleadingly suggest that it permits 5,000 migrants to enter the country illegally every day.The legislation, which links additional funding in military aid for Ukraine with immigration policy, would more aggressively tamp down on illegal crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico.The claim has become a popular talking point, reflecting broader pushback by Republicans who have seized on the border security provisions in the $118.3 billion bill and derided them as too lax.But the bill does not, in fact, authorize immigrants to cross the border illegally. Instead, among other provisions, it would give officials the authority to summarily remove migrants, with little recourse, after a certain number cross: an average of 5,000 encounters per day for a week, or 8,500 in a single day.Here’s a fact check.WHAT WAS SAID“The Biden/Schumer Open Border Bill allows 5,000 immigrants a day into our country.”— House Republicans in a social media post on Monday“Here’s what the people pushing this ‘deal’ aren’t telling you: It accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day and gives automatic work permits to asylum recipients — a magnet for more illegal immigration.”— Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, in a social media post on SundayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Deal Close on Border and Ukraine, Republican Rifts Threaten to Kill Both

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      A divided G.O.P. coalesced behind a bit of legislative extortion: No Ukraine aid without a border crackdown. Now they are split over how large a price to demand, imperiling both initiatives.Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican and staunch conservative, this week trumpeted the immigration compromise he has been negotiating with Senate Democrats and White House officials as one shaping up to be “by far, the most conservative border security bill in four decades.”Speaker Mike Johnson, in contrast, sent out a fund-raising message on Friday denouncing the forthcoming deal as a Democratic con. “My answer is NO. Absolutely NOT,” his message said, adding, “This is the hill I’ll die on.”The Republican disconnect explains why, with an elusive bipartisan bargain on immigration seemingly as close as it has been in years on Capitol Hill, the prospects for enactment are grim. It is also why hopes for breaking the logjam over sending more U.S. aid to Ukraine are likely to be dashed by hard-line House Republicans.The situation encapsulates the divide cleaving the Republican Party. On one side are the right-wing MAGA allies of former President Donald J. Trump, an America First isolationist who instituted draconian immigration policies while in office. On the other is a dwindling group of more mainstream traditionalists who believe the United States should play an assertive role defending democracy on the world stage.The two wings coalesced last fall around a bit of legislative extortion: They would only agree to President Biden’s request to send about $60 billion more to Ukraine for its fight against Russian aggression if he agreed to their demands to clamp down on migration at the United States border with Mexico. But now, they are at odds about how large of a price to demand.Hard-right House Republicans, who are far more dug in against aid to Ukraine, have argued that the bipartisan border compromise brokered by their counterparts in the Senate is unacceptable. And they bluntly say they do not want to give Mr. Biden the opportunity in an election year to claim credit for cracking down on unauthorized immigration.Instead, with Mr. Trump agitating against the deal from the campaign trail, they are demanding a return to more severe immigration policies that he imposed, which stand no chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate. Those include a revival of the Remain in Mexico policy, under which migrants seeking to enter the United States were blocked and made to stay elsewhere while they waited to appear in immigration court to plead their cases.While Senate G.O.P. leaders have touted the emerging agreement as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a breakthrough on the border, hard-right House members have dismissed it as the work of establishment Republicans out of touch with the G.O.P. base.“Let’s talk about Mitch McConnell — he has a 6 percent approval rating,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said of the Senate minority leader. “He wouldn’t be the one to be listening to, making deals on the border.”She said that after Mr. Trump’s decisive win in the Iowa caucuses, “It’s time for all Republicans, Senate and the House, to get behind his policies.”As for the proposed aid to Ukraine, Ms. Greene is threatening to oust Mr. Johnson from the speakership if he brings it to the floor.“My red line is Ukraine,” she said, expressing confidence that the speaker would heed her threat. “I’m making it very clear to him. We will not see it on the House floor — that is my expectation.”House Republicans have opposed sending money to Ukraine without a deal on immigration.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThe situation is particularly fraught for Mr. Johnson, the novice House speaker whose own sympathies lie with the far right but who is facing immense institutional pressures — from Mr. Biden, Democrats in Congress and his fellow Republicans in the Senate — to embrace a deal pairing border policy changes with aid to Ukraine.Mr. Johnson has positioned himself as a Trump loyalist, quickly endorsing the former president after winning the gavel, and said that he has spoken regularly to the former president about the Senate immigration deal and everything else. After infuriating hard-right Republicans on Thursday by pushing through a short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown, the speaker has little incentive to enrage them again and defy the wishes of Mr. Trump, who has disparaged the Senate compromise.“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media this week.Democrats already have agreed to substantial concessions in the talks, including making it more difficult for migrants to claim asylum; expanding detention and expulsion authorities; and shutting down the intake of migrants when attempted crossings reach a level that would overwhelm detention facilities — around 5,000 migrants a day.But far-right Republicans have dismissed the compromise out of hand, saying the changes would still allow many immigrants to enter the country each year without authorization.Election-year politics is playing a big role. Representative Bob Good, Republican of Virginia and the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said passing the Senate bill would give “political cover” to Mr. Biden for his failures at the border.“Democrats want to look like they care about the border, then run out the clock so Biden wins re-election,” Mr. Good said. “It would be terrible for the country to give political cover to the facilitators of the border invasion.”Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, said that while Mr. Johnson broke with the right on federal spending because he feared a government shutdown, “I think on the immigration issue, there’s more unity.”Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, warned that the immigration compromise was a “unique opportunity” that would not be available to Republicans next year, even if they were to win majorities in both chambers of Congress and win back the White House.“The Democrats will not give us anything close to this if we have to get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate in a Republican majority,” he said.Speaker Mike Johnson has positioned himself as a Trump loyalist. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMany mainstream House Republicans believe that Mr. Johnson would be making a terrible mistake if he heeded the advice of the most far-right voices and refused to embrace an immigration deal. They argue that doing so would squander an opportunity to win important policy changes and the political boost that would come with showing that Republicans can govern.“Big city mayors are talking about the same thing that Texas conservatives are talking about,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, a close ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Take the moment, man. Take the policy win, bank it, and go back for more. That is always the goal.”But for some Republicans, taking the policy win is less important than continuing to have a political issue to rail against in an election year.“It’s worse than doing nothing to give political cover for a sham border security bill that does nothing to actually secure the border,” Mr. Good said.Mr. Burchett, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, rolled his eyes when asked about Mr. McHenry’s entreaties not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.“McHenry’s leaving,” he said of the congressman, who has announced he will not run for re-election next year. More

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      Lankford Apologizes to Black Voters for Backing Trump’s Election Deceit

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLankford Apologizes to Black Voters for Backing Trump’s Election DeceitThe Oklahoma senator, who is up for re-election in 2022, said he had not realized his objection to the election results would be seen as a direct attack on the voting rights of people of color.Senator James Lankford said in a letter that he had never intended to “diminish the voice of any Black American.”Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesJan. 15, 2021Updated 8:24 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who were offended by his decision to join President Trump in trying to discredit the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., saying he had not realized the effort would be seen as a direct attack on the voting rights of people of color.In a letter addressed to his “friends” in North Tulsa, which is predominantly Black, Mr. Lankford, who is white, acknowledged that his initial efforts to upend Mr. Biden’s victory — which he dropped in the immediate aftermath of the deadly assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob — had “caused a firestorm of suspicion among many of my friends, particularly in Black communities around the state.”“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote in a letter first published by the news site Tulsa World and obtained by The New York Times. “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you. I deeply regret my blindness to that perception, and for that I am sorry.”The letter offered the latest evidence of how the Capitol siege has rocked the Republican Party to its core, prompting some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters to abandon him, alienating some of its crucial constituencies and setting off a painful period of soul-searching that could also have profound political consequences.Mr. Lankford is facing re-election in 2022, and will soon have to decide whether to convict the president in an impeachment trial in which Mr. Trump faces a charge of “incitement of insurrection.”While he did not offer a direct apology for questioning the legitimacy of votes, Mr. Lankford was among the handful of senators who withdrew his objection to counting some Electoral College votes cast for Mr. Biden after a throng of Mr. Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol complex. But it was a striking note of contrition, particularly as several of Mr. Lankford’s Republican colleagues who lodged the challenges, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, continue to defiantly defend their efforts to throw out thousands of votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.The letter came amid calls from Black leaders for Mr. Lankford to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, whose mission is to commemorate the racist massacre in the city’s Greenwood district, where a white mob destroyed an affluent Black neighborhood and its Black-owned businesses, and killed up to 300 residents.Among the rioters who rampaged through the Capitol last week were members of white supremacist groups, and one man who carried a Confederate flag has been arrested.Some Black leaders in Oklahoma said the senator’s note of regret betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of how his actions had helped perpetuate racism.“To use the words like any perceived racism — we’re in 2021 now,” said Greg Robinson II, an organizer and former candidate for Tulsa mayor who is among those who have called for Mr. Lankford and other Republicans to step down. “There has been generations upon generations of systemic racism that has been protected by the sort of white moderate rhetoric that we hear out of white politicians, especially white conservative Republicans.”Mr. Lankford, a former Southern Baptist minister who directed the largest Christian youth camp before an inaugural run for office landed him in the House in 2011, has served in the Senate since 2014. Having burnished his credentials as a conservative Republican and deficit hawk, he muscled through a primary to win a special election and finish the term of former Senator Tom Coburn before a second victory in 2016.In the Senate, Mr. Lankford has been a supporter of Mr. Trump, largely backing his policy initiatives and nominees even as he offered the occasional condemnation of the president’s vulgarity and personal attacks.“I think most of us have a hard time with Donald Trump’s personality, but don’t have a problem with most of his policies,” said Frank Keating, a two-term governor of Oklahoma and veteran of multiple Republican administrations. “You can’t be much more conservative than James Lankford.”But Mr. Lankford has also worked to build relationships with the Black community in Tulsa, speaking about the Tulsa massacre on the Senate floor and advocating the creation of a school curriculum to ensure that the 1921 massacre would be taught. When Mr. Trump announced plans to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrated on June 19 that honors the end of slavery in the United States, Mr. Lankford was among the officials who successfully convinced the president it would be more respectful to hold the rally on a different day.All five Oklahoman representatives and Mr. Lankford were among the more than 100 Republicans in both chambers seeking to invalidate the votes of tens of millions of voters in several states — many of them Black citizens living in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — even as courts threw out baseless challenges by Mr. Trump and his allies about election malfeasance.His involvement came as a shock to many on Capitol Hill and in Oklahoma, in part because he is regarded by Democrats as a rare, cooperative partner on voting rights. Some speculated privately that it had more to do with the fact that Mr. Lankford must face voters in two years than any actual concern he harbored about the integrity of the election.“That result of that decision is bringing a hailstorm of criticism,” said a state senator, Kevin L. Matthews, founder and chairman of the 1921 commission. In an interview, he said he personally did not believe Mr. Lankford should resign from the commission, but that some members believed it was inconsistent with his drive to invalidate the election results. “There are a lot of people that feel like you can’t stand for both.”Mr. Lankford and other Republicans had claimed that by challenging the election results, they were exercising their independence and acting in the interests of constituents who were demanding answers. In an interview the morning of Jan. 6, he sought to distinguish his argument from Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election could be overturned, saying he had been clear that there was no constitutional way to subvert the will of a majority of American voters.“Everybody’s got their own motives in this, to be able to solve this,” he said. “For me, long term, we’ve got to be able to find a constitutional way to be able to resolve some of these issues.”Less than four hours later, Mr. Lankford would be interrupted in his opening argument by the Senate’s sudden adjournment, as an aide whispered to him that the mob was inside the Capitol building.In a secure location on Capitol Hill, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, recalled pleading with Mr. Lankford and Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, to reverse course and support the counting of votes. The pair later released a joint statement calling on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results,” and saying the lawlessness and chaos had caused them to change their minds.“We disagree on a lot of things, and we have a lot of spirited debate in this room,” Mr. Lankford said that evening. “But we talk it out, and we honor each other — even in our disagreement.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Lankford Apologizes to Black Constituents for Election Objections

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyLive Updates: Pelosi Expected to Speak About ImpeachmentA Republican senator from Oklahoma apologizes to Black constituents for seeking to disenfranchise them.Jan. 15, 2021, 7:59 a.m. ETJan. 15, 2021, 7:59 a.m. ETMike Ives and Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, in October. He has apologized for trying to reverse the results of the presidential election and disenfranchise tens of millions of voters.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSenator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who spent weeks trying to reverse the results of the presidential election before changing his mind at the last moment, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who felt he had attacked their right to vote.In a letter addressed to his “friends” in North Tulsa, which has many Black residents, Mr. Lankford, who is white, wrote on Thursday that his efforts to challenge the election result had “caused a firestorm of suspicion among many of my friends, particularly in Black communities around the state.”“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote, according to the news site Tulsa World.Mr. Lankford said in the letter that he had never intended to “diminish the voice of any Black American.” Still, he added, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you.”Mr. Lankford, who sits on a key Senate oversight committee, was initially one of the Republicans who tried to upend Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, even as courts threw out baseless questions raised by President Trump and his allies about election malfeasance.Democrats in Congress have viewed Mr. Lankford as a rare, cooperative partner on voting rights, and his decision to join those Republicans seeking to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters — many of them Black citizens living in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — came as a surprise.The first indication he might do so came during his appearance in December at a Senate hearing about alleged voting “irregularities,” when he repeated unsupported Trump campaign allegations about voting in Nevada that had been debunked in court nearly two weeks earlier.Mr. Lankford and other Republicans had claimed that by challenging the election results, they were exercising their independence and acting in the interests of constituents who were demanding answers.“There are lots of folks in my state that still want those answers to come out,” Mr. Lankford said a few days before the Electoral College vote was certified.After the riot at the Capitol, Mr. Lankford was one of several Republican senators who abandoned their earlier challenge, saying the lawlessness and chaos had caused them to changed their minds.In a joint statement that night with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, Mr. Lankford called on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results.”Mr. Lankford has faced calls from Black leaders to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which is designed to commemorate the racist massacre in the city’s Greenwood district, an affluent Black community known as Black Wall Street. The massacre, which took place 100 years ago this spring, was one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history. A white mob destroyed the neighborhood and its Black-owned businesses, and up to 300 residents were killed.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More