House Lawmakers Introduce Bill To Increase Immigrants Into America
(FreedomBeacon.com)- Two members of the House have introduced a bipartisan bill that would seek to increase the number of visas the country allows for its partners from Afghanistan.
Called the Showing American Values by Evacuating (SAVE) Afghan Partners Act, the bill looks to increase the current cap on Special Immigrant Visas that are available for Afghan interpreters and other partners of the U.S. who are vulnerable in the new Taliban-led Afghanistan. The bill would increase the total number of visas available to 10,000.
The bill is being co-sponsored by Representatives Peter Meijer, a Republican from Michigan, and Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado.
In a release, Meijer, who himself traveled discretely to Kabul last week, said:
“While the U.S. military is no longer present in Afghanistan, our mission there is not over. By clarifying SIV eligibility requirements and raising the visa cap, we will ensure that our allies are protected and our promises are kept. Our creditability and moral standing in the world depend on the completion of this mission.”
Meijer traveled secretary to Kabul last week with Democratic Representative Seth Moulton from Massachusetts. They said they made the trip to “provide oversight” to the ongoing evacuation.
In a statement they released after their departure from Kabul, they said:
“America has a moral obligation to our citizens and loyal allies, and we must make sure that obligation is being kept.”
In touting the new SAVE bill he is co-sponsoring, Crow said:
“For 20 years, our Afghan partners worked with us and fought with us to accomplish our missions in Afghanistan. They did so with the understanding that if they stood with our soldiers, America would be a place where they could seek refuge. The war may be over, but we can’t leave our friends and partners behind.”
Monday marked the official end to the war in Afghanistan, as the last United States military plane left the country. A day later, President Joe Biden promised that the U.S. would continue to help facilitate the evacuation of any American still remaining in Afghanistan.
To that end, he said there was “no deadline” for that particular mission to end. He added:
“As for the Afghans, we and our partners have airlifted 100,000 of them. No country in history has done more to airlift out the residents of another country than we have done. We will continue to work to help more people leave the country who are at risk.”
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, emphasized that point when he spoke publicly Monday. He said even though the U.S. won’t have a military presence in Afghanistan any more, evacuation efforts would continue on. He explained:
“We will hold the Taliban to their commitment on freedom of movement for foreign nationals, visa holders, at-risk Afghans.”
Some of the people most at risk would be those who worked for the U.S. in any capacity during the last 20 years the war in Afghanistan was going on.
Lawmakers Write Letter Asking Pelosi To End Biden’s Presidency
(FreedomBeacon.com)- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has another issue on her hands. Some Republicans in Washington are openly calling for her to start impeaching proceedings against her party’s own leader, President Joe Biden.
On Monday night, a group of GOP lawmakers sent a letter to Pelosi, calling on her to hold the president accountable for his role in abandoning Americans over in Afghanistan. They are calling Biden’s handling of the exit from the country as disastrous.
The letter was signed by five Republican Representatives — Yvette Herrell from New Mexico, Pete Sessions from Texas, Jeff Van Drew from New Jersey, Ronny Jackson from Texas and Claudia Tenney from New York.
In part, the letter read:
“The American people must have full confidence in their Commander in Chief’s judgment and ability to protect our country and respond decisively to national security threats.
“We have no confidence in President Joseph R. Biden’s ability to carry out his duties as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.
“His unilateral, reckless decision to retreat from Afghanistan was done against the advice of military and national security experts, and it has now put thousands of American military personnel, citizens and Afghan allies in grave peril. Tragically, at least 12 service members have lost their lives in the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in the last decade.”
There are now no more American troops stationed in Afghanistan, after the August 31 deadline Biden put forth has passed. Still, there are hundreds of U.S. citizens who are still there.
The Biden administration has promised to continue working to safely evacuate every American — and as many Afghan allies and vulnerable people as possible — even though U.S. troops are no longer there. How effective that will be, though, is anyone’s guess at this point.
The Taliban now has full control of Afghanistan, and terrorist groups such as ISIS-K are carrying out violent acts, such as the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that left 12 U.S. service members and more than 170 people dead.
Biden has taken the brunt of the scrutiny for this mess that he has created in only a few short months in the White House. This is why the GOP legislators sent their letter to Pelosi.
It continued:
“President Biden refuses to take responsibility for his actions and continues to mishandle the deteriorating situation at every step. In addition, he has deliberately misled the American people in response to questions posed by the media. Free nations around the world look to the United States for leadership, and President Biden has proven definitively, and repeatedly, since this crisis began that he is not capable of effectively executing his duties as our Commander-in-Chief and leader of the free world.”
“As members of Congress, we have the duty to oversee the Executive Branch and provide for the common defense of the United States of America. We do not have confidence in President Biden’s ability to continue serving as Commander-in-Chief. It is after much consideration and with heavy hearts at the current state of our nation that we call upon you, Speaker of the House of Representatives, to begin impeachment proceedings immediately.”
On Wednesday, Brigitte Gabriel spoke with Real America's Voice on Studio 6B and blasted Biden, demanding for his impeachment:
"Afghanistan is a total disaster. We have created a mess. This lays totally on the lap of Joe Biden. He needs to be impeached. This national security team needs to be fired. And it is shocking how seventeen intelligence agencies in the United States have failed on every single level."
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Flattery And Empty Promises Won’t Preserve An Alliance
BY JONATHAN TOBIN/JNS.ORGSEPTEMBER 04, 2021
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The reviews at home were mixed for Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's first meeting with President Joe Biden. Many of those who despise Bennett's right-wing principles thought he did a good job, while most of those who share his views were appalled by his performance.
The disconnect is understandable. The drumbeat of personal invective against Bennett from former allies and friends has been constant since he assumed the role of leader of the current coalition in June. For those who think Bennett "betrayed" the right by joining with left-wingers, Arabs and right-wing critics of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, everything he does is always going to be wrong.
Those critiques became even more shrill observing Bennett's meeting with Biden as the prime minister did his best to ingratiate the president. Coming as it did in the middle of a nightmarish week for Biden as his precipitate and disastrous flight from Afghanistan went from bad to worse (the event was put off by a day because of the terrorist attacks in Kabul that took the lives of 13 American personnel), Bennett's conspicuous public flattery was hard to miss.
The rest of the world--from European allies to domestic opponents--excoriated Biden and noted his tired, petulant demeanor and often wildly inaccurate and disingenuous defenses of his policy and its inept execution. But Bennett was assigned the role of the faithful friend who was there to momentarily distract us from the horror show.
They forget that Netanyahu would have done the same thing had he still been prime minister. Staying as close as possible to whoever it is that happens to be sitting in the White House is one of the first duties of any Israeli prime minister.
The open breach between Netanyahu and former President Barack Obama in the aftermath of America's awful nuclear deal with Iran is all we tend to remember about the pair's interactions. But Bennett's detractors would do well to remember all the flattery the Likud leader lavished on Obama in the first year of his presidency, even as the new Democratic administration plotted to topple the Likud-led government at the start of Netanyahu's record 12-year run as prime minister.
The same was true at the beginning of Obama's second term, especially during his 2013 visit to Israel. Despite the abuse he took--on and off the record from administration aides--as long as there was a chance that Obama would do the right thing on Iran, Netanyahu continued the public flattery past the point when everyone had stopped believing a word of it.
In that same spirit, Bennett's sucking up continued even after the meetings between the two leaders as the Israeli's staff did their best to buck up the beleaguered White House. They dispensed quotes about (appearances to the contrary) how "sharp" Bennett found Biden to be and debunked claims that the president dozed off during the photo op since he merely briefly closed his eyes or looked down rather than, as protocol normally demands, at his guest.
You can roll your eyes at the absurdity of the Israelis' position, but Bennett was entirely right to play the part of the eager admirer. The stakes involved in gathering support against both nuclear and conventional threats from Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries are just too great for the prime minister to flinch from such flattery.
Even if the odds that the administration will turn back from its determination to repeat Obama's quest for a rapprochement with Tehran are slim, it's Bennett's job to seek every opportunity to make that point. And by providing Biden with public support at a moment when he desperately needed it, Bennett has put himself in a slightly stronger position to demand that the Americans not leave Israel and its Arab allies on their own in facing Iran.
If making nice with Biden will help preserve what's left of the illusion of bipartisanship about support for Israel, then that is what must be done. At a time when the Democratic Party is deeply divided between those who are friendly while critical of the Jewish state and those who are openly hostile to it, it's obligatory for Bennett to show that he is as interested in fostering support from Democrats as well as Republicans, who are almost universally supportive.
Even if Bennett gets the credit he deserves for letting the White House think it has a friend in Jerusalem, it would be foolish to put much credence in Biden's assurances.
Bennett pocketed an even more extravagant promise from Biden about stopping Iran's nuclear quest than the one he made during former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin's White House visit in June. At that time, Biden said Iran wouldn't get a nuke "on my watch."
That was utterly disingenuous since even if Biden can somehow entice or bribe the Iranians to re-enter the 2015 nuclear deal the Obama administration struck with Tehran, that wouldn't prevent the Islamic regime from acquiring a weapon after Biden left office. Indeed, the sunset clauses set to expire at the end of the decade now assure Iran of a legal path to a bomb.
According to Bennett, Biden pledged that Iran will "never be able to acquire a nuclear weapon."
That's nice to hear, but given the supine negotiating position of the United States in the stalled talks on the nuclear question going on in Vienna, it's hard to see why anyone should take that promise seriously.
Despite the rationalizations, we are hearing from Biden and his cheerleaders in the media, the fiasco that he presided over in Afghanistan only lessens the chance that Iran will take him seriously. The idea that the administration will pursue non-diplomatic options to stop Tehran's nuclear ambitions once they concede that diplomacy has failed is a fantasy.
That's true despite the fact that neither Biden nor White House spokesperson Jen Psaki is willing to say what those alternative options might be or even to hint that force would or could ever be used.
For Biden's foreign-policy team, diplomacy is an end to itself rather than a means to securing specific objectives in the interests of America and its allies. The belief of figures like Secretary of State Antony Blinken in multilateralism is ideological in nature more than anything else
For them, the merits of more sanctions or covert actions undertaken by Israel that have helped to sabotage or to delay Iran's nuclear progress are immaterial. Rather, as we have seen first with Obama and now Biden, Washington's attitude is not geared towards a strategy of how best to halt Iran's quest for regional hegemony and a nuclear weapon.
The administration is not capable of changing its policies even if Iran refuses to engage in diplomacy or if the Israelis put forward persuasive arguments about the need for urgent action. That's because their stands are rooted in sensibilities about how nations ought to behave, not what will actually work to achieve the goal of stopping Iran.
So, while Bennett is doing the right thing in pursuing a friendship with Biden, it's almost certain to be of little help in securing his country's interests. That's cold comfort for Israelis, who would like to believe that having someone not named Netanyahu in charge will make it easier to rally America to come to its senses on Iran. But it is nonetheless a reality that they must accept as they ponder the next three years when--happy talk in Washington notwithstanding--they are likely to be left on their own against Iran.
Originally published at JNS.org - reposted with permission.
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