California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) took aim at “pathetically weak” Republicans following former President Donald Trump’s pressuring of GOP lawmakers to pass on any bipartisan border deal.
Newsom, in an interview for MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” on Thursday, knocked reported comments by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who allegedly told GOP colleagues that the “politics on this have changed” as Trump wants to focus on immigration in his run for the White House.
“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” said McConnell of the former president, according to Punchbowl News.
Newsom told Wagner that the report about McConnell was “shameful.”
“That he’s just completely rolling over and capitulating. Don’t even get me started with the weakness of the current speaker of the House. I mean, they don’t want a deal, period, full stop. They don’t want a deal. They don’t want to make this a quote unquote campaign win for Joe Biden,” Newsom said.
“It says everything you need to know about the fraud that they’re perpetuating on the issue of the border.”
The California governor added that Republicans have wanted to make it a “political issue” ever since the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators who watched as their proposed immigration reform bill passed in the Senate back in 2013 only for the House to not act on the bill.
“And ever since there, everyone, they just walk away. They run away,” said Newsom before going on to cite President Joe Biden’s $14 billion proposal to tackle border security.
“They won’t touch it. They don’t want to solve it. They want to use it for political purposes.”
Newsom, who acknowledged that he’s a “border state governor,” called it a “disgrace” what the GOP and Trump are doing with the negotiations.
“And these guys are so weak. How — it’s so pathetically weak, this Republican Party and the new speaker said ’Oh yes, sir. What else would you like us to do? We don’t care about America. We don’t care about our freedoms and liberties, we care about politics exclusively at the expense of the American people. ‘Cause all we care about is winning for winning’s sake,’” Newsom said.
“That is shameful.”