You might not have noticed, but Minnesota governor and losing 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz is on a national tour. He is holding town halls in congressional districts won by President Donald Trump in Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin and more. Any time a national political figure schedules a visit to Iowa, there is speculation that he or she is going to run for president. But Tim Walz? Really?
Walz told CNN Sunday that while he is considering a run for a third term as governor in 2026, "I am not thinking about running in 2028." Parse that any way you like.
Walz made a little news on the issue of former President Joe Biden's decision to run for reelection when he was clearly unable to mentally and physically handle the job. Walz blamed Biden himself -- "He made the decision" -- and then added, "I would hope we would never do it again." Then, he changed the subject.
One eye-opening part of the interview was when Walz was asked about the Harris-Walz ticket's position on immigration and the disaster at the U.S.-Mexico border. His answer suggested that if Democrats had won the election last November, the problem at the border created by President Biden would have continued under President Kamala Harris.
"On immigration," Walz said, "what we were asking for is a bipartisan policy that strengthens immigration control, that recognizes that we need a workforce here, that they should be allowed here legally, and that, when they get here, they're part of the American fabric."
From that, it appears that Walz's border policy was to legalize the migrants who were crossing illegally during the Biden years, get them jobs and then make sure that they are "part of the American fabric." At another point in the interview, Walz said, "None of us are saying we should be soft on the border." But that sounds pretty soft on the border.
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Walz continued: "I'm not going to say what we need to do is, we need to just arrest people and ship them to El Salvador. No, what we need to do, invest the money on the border. We need to make sure that we have the judges necessary to adjudicate things faster. We need to make sure, if you're going to be in this country here legally, when you are, you're going to be uplifted, celebrated and part of this great American tapestry. And that is the bipartisan bill we had."
That last part was a reference to legislation that Harris often claimed would fix the problems of thousands and thousands of migrants crossing the border every day and being allowed to stay in the United States. The bill, Harris said in many campaign appearances, would be the heart of her border and immigration policy. It never passed House or Senate votes, nor would it today if Walz and Harris were in the White House.
But what Walz's interview really brings to mind is the fact that if he and Harris had been elected, the border problem would still be with us. One of the remarkable things about the second Trump administration is how quickly Trump stopped the massive and destructive flow of illegal crossers over the border. The border crisis, once named in opinion polls as one of the nation's most pressing issues, virtually disappeared overnight.
"Since taking office, my administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history, and we quickly achieved the lowest numbers of illegal border crossers ever recorded," Trump said in his March address to a joint session of Congress. "The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation: 'We must have legislation to secure the border.' But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president."
He was right. Trump has, of course, since moved on to other issues and controversies. But with his discussion of the border, Walz gave us a deeply troubling glimpse of what might have been.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. Email him at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.
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