You can tell the Democrats are feeling their oats and ready to call bullsh*t on these horrible Republican policies -- Luis Gutierrez could hardly restrain himself during this hearing today with Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
"The majority of the committee here must think that you are doing a fantastic job, because they ordered this hearing so you could come before us, and look tough and remorseless just in the time for the holidays -- the remorseless secretary during the holidays -- Christmas, as they like to make sure and specify. i suspect that if you still have your job, as always seems to be a big question, in three weeks we'll see if you still have the same sympathetic questions when you come back," Gutierrez said.
Wow. Tell us how you really feel, Rep. Gutierrez!
Andrea Mitchell said starting today, migrants who come to the U.S. to seek asylum will be required to return to Mexico and wait there for the duration of their immigration proceedings.
She called the latest changes "Alice In Wonderland time. It's the Mad Hatter's tea party, when they're saying something is true when it's not. These witnesses are testifying. Of course, right now no one is challenging them."
I guess she's talking about the neutered Republicans!
And of course, we have all those children who have been separated from their parents.
"The fact that they did not keep track of them. Apparently she has just testified they know where they all are. That actually is delusional. The answers I'm hearing from the secretary of Homeland Security are delusional based on the facts we know," Susan Page said.
"She was pressed again on talking about the separation policy and how come they weren't able to track all of these young people separated from their families and she said 'We did know. We've known all along.' Each organization, HHS, the Department of Homeland Security, everybody knew where everybody was. The problem was not each agency tracked, they didn't interact with each other. They didn't reunify 2600 kids taken away from their parents.
"Most delusional of all today, the secretary sat there in front of this congressional committee and said there was never a policy to separate children from their parents. We know it's wrong. I was with the folks who discovered the documents who said that she knew there was a separation policy and she put it into place."
Mitchell asked how they can keep it up.
"Well, it's going to be harder to keep it up when you get the oversight of a Democratically-controlled House because some of these questions will be pursued in a much more aggressive way and there will be an effort to get documents to show what the administration's policy was, who knew about it and when they knew about it," Page said.
"We're on the hinge point, I think, of the first two years of the Trump administration is going to be very different from the second two years of the Trump administration because, as we like to say, elections have consequences."
