(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) The Democrat who chairs the open-borders-advocating Progressive Caucus in Congress made some pricey home renovations this year.
According to the Seattle Times, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal “reported spending over $45,000 this year on home security using campaign donations, according to Federal Election Commission records.”
The news outlet indicated in its story’s headline that new architecture included a fence.
In a reversal of an earlier position, Jayapal, who represents a Seattle-area district, presumably now has concluded that walls do, in fact, work.
In 2019, for instance, however, she articulated a different view as a way to disparage former President Donald Trump.
At that time, she took to Twitter to declare that “The hypocrisy of Trump’s vanity wall. He wants to show it being built—at enormous cost to taxpayers—even if it helps people break through easier. It’s just an expensive hoax. P.S. People can get through walls. That’s why they don’t work.” [emphasis added]
The hypocrisy of Trump’s vanity wall. He wants to show it being built—at enormous cost to taxpayers—even if it helps people break through easier. It’s just an expensive hoax.
P.S. People can get through walls. That’s why they don’t work. https://t.co/o96AsTdiDN
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) November 13, 2019
In the Times article published on Wednesday, Jayapal explained to the news outlet that “I’ve had threats against my life, including a man showing up with a gun at my door, and I never in a million years thought that I would need to take such strong steps to protect my safety and security just to be able to do my job, the job that people elected me to do.”
Threats made against any elected official on either side of the aisle are abhorrent and unacceptable. In a polarized political climate, most people would agree that security measures seem reasonable, understandable and warranted.
“The FEC allows congresspeople greater leeway when spending donations for personal protection,” the Times noted. But the inherent falsity in how leftists like Jayapal spend those funds is glaring.
Parenthetically, personal security spending by police-defunding proponents has sometimes raised eyebrows. One notable and ignoble example would be Jayapal’s Squad gal-pal, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mass., who spent more than $300,000 on private security last year while advocating to defund police.
Apart from their opposition to border security, progressives like Jayapal, if they had their way, however, would probably prefer to water down the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens who might be concerned about their own personal protection.
The hypocrisy (to use Jayapal’s word) also extends to the incumbent U.S. president.
Upon taking office, Joe Biden halted any further construction of the Trump wall at the U.S-Mexico border and has presided over an illegal immigration crisis of epic proportions and with no end in sight.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security is spending about $460,000 to erect a security fence around Biden’s Delaware beach house.
Critics pointed out that the Biden administration has no problem constructing a security barrier—except if it’s along America’s southern border.
Insofar as Rep. Jayapal is concerned, the radical left Squad member with a history of inflammatory rhetoric is the same lawmaker whose knowledge of the Middle East has recently turned out to be suboptimal.
Last month, the U.S. House implicitly rebuked Jayapal with overwhelming bipartisan support for Israel in the form of a Republican-led resolution after she falsely claimed that the only functioning democracy in the Middle East is a racist state.
Jayapal, who voted for the resolution in the end, had walked back her anti-Semitic comments and insisted that they were aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a center-right governing coalition in his country.
Netanyahu, who has faced his own border wall woes, came under fire when he supported Trump’s efforts to build the US-Mexico security wall that the private-security fence-loving Jayapal opposed.
“President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration,” Netanyahu wrote in a 2017 tweet. “Great Success. Great idea,” he added, posted with coupled pictures of the Israeli and U.S. flags.
