Politicians excoriated President Barack Obama Wednesday for traveling to Texas to fill Democratic coffers while not going to the U.S.-Mexican border, where tens of thousands unaccompanied minors are entering the country, according to news media reports.
"How can you have a humanitarian crisis, as the White House has called this, and not want to go see it for yourself?" Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn asked.
Another Texas Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, blamed the situation on the president’s "lawlessness."
"President Obama today is down in the state of Texas," Cruz said. "But sadly, he’s not visiting the border. He’s not visiting the children who are suffering as a result of the failures of the Obama policies. Instead, he’s doing fundraisers. He’s visiting Democratic fat cats to collect checks and apparently there’s no time to look at the disaster, the devastation that’s being caused by his policies."
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Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to deal with the child migrant crisis and has defended his decision not to see the situation firsthand.
"There’s nothing that is taking place down there that I am not intimately aware of and briefed on," he said, according to a
Reuters report.
Arizona Sen. John McCain accused Obama of practicing "selective morality," in essence rewarding the children of Central America for snubbing snub immigration laws while people in other ravaged nations don’t reap the same benefit,
NBC News reported.
"What about people in other parts of the world? Don’t they need this kind of relief?" McCain asked. "Aren’t they persecuted? What about the Middle East? What about Africa? This is selective morality that’s being practiced here. We want people to come to this country legally, we want them to come if they are persecuted. But we want [it in] an orderly fashion."
Even a fellow Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, piled onto the president for his decision to bypass a visit to the border towns over fundraising, according to
The Washington Post. Cuellar has said this could be Obama’s "Katrina moment," referencing President George W. Bush’s slow response to visit New Orleans following the devastating 2005 storm.
Post columnist Dana Milbank called the president’s decision to bypass the border "inexplicable."
"His absence makes it appear that he is hiding from the issue, giving his critics a free shot," Milbank wrote.
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