Newell Normand had plenty of positive things to say about Kamala Harris' acceptance speech at the DNC on Thursday night, but one thing puzzled him and that was her 'sudden epiphany' on how she can solve the problems at the border.
"When she set out to talk about immigration. It was as if there was this epiphany that she went through either just before arriving on the stage or at some point in time here in the last week that she is now convinced herself and is attempting to convince others that she's going to solve the immigration problem and gain control of the border."
Note that controlling the issues at the border was supposed to be Harris' job as part of the Biden presidential administration for ... well, the last nearly four years. What have they done to fix it? Very little, conservatives would argue.
"She has spent very little time at the border. She has spent almost no time visiting counties at the border that have really been suffering. And it was blatantly obvious throughout this convention that the Democratic Party realizes that this is a big issue for them. It's a challenge for them. And they have set out to rewrite history," Newell said.
There was a time not too long ago that sheriffs in Texas -- especially San Antonio -- were begging the Biden-Harris administration to come down and see firsthand what the crisis looked like. And now the Dems are blaming the GOP for the border bill that was jettisoned although, as Newell said, it was rife with problems.
"The amount of money that was going to be spent there was just crazy," he said. "I mean, we were increasing agency budgets (so much). You heard me talk a lot about the ability to receive the money. This was going to be a landscape that was going to be beautiful for fraud."
Now, Harris supports a three-pronged plan that would emphasize firm and enforceable rules at the border; create significant investment in border infrastructure, including enhanced technology and staffing at the ports of entry, and to prioritize asylum cases for individuals seeking protection at official ports of entry, while managing the release of migrants in a more organized manner to ensure communities are adequately prepared. For point three, they want a 'cruelty free immigration structure.'
The plan also calls for creating an immigration FEMA which Newell said would be a bureaucratic quagmire. In short, Newell sees it like this: "They want you to finance their life while they're trying to work our system, that they moved across the border illegally."
And here's the big question for Kamala Harris and her supporters.
"Why are things not really improving even though we're throwing more money at it?" Newell asked.