Watch: Elise Stefanik Makes Tim Kaine Look Silly When He Pretends Democrats Care About Border Security

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine isn’t exactly having a good run during the Senate confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s nominees.

Fresh off his unfortunate starring role in the Pete Hegseth hearing, the lawmaker and former running mate to Hillary Clinton tried to assure both Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the rest of America that the idea of Democrats supporting “open borders” is, in fact, a “fantasy.”

You may perhaps guess how this turned out.

Kaine — who was, to be fair, more genial than he was during the Hegseth hearing — began his querying with the usual talk about how he’d met with the candidate and while they had very different ideas, he hoped they could work together, and so forth and so on.

When someone is bound to be confirmed, you’re going to hear tons of this from Democrats who hope they can transform conservatives into milquetoast RINOs in the name of “bipartisanship.”

However, he had an issue with Stefanik pointing out that the Democratic Party, under now-former President Joe Biden, was basically waving illegal immigrants through the borders like a matador with a cape — and he was, to use a favorite liberal phrase, Big Mad that Stefanik had pointed this out in a when she was a member of the House from New York.

“Stefanik tweeted, ‘Democrats desperately want wide-open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote,’” Kaine read to committee members. “I’d like to put that in the record.”

Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote.

Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) May 16, 2022

“I can separate campaign rhetoric from governing rhetoric,” Kaine said, with the smuggest smile you’ll see during this entire process. “I don’t view things like that as disqualifying. They do raise questions.”

He then went on to the crisis in Haiti, which he said could “create immigration challenges and all kinds of other challenges that are bad on the humanitarian front,” asking what the United States can do to “help Haitians find a next chapter that is a peaceful one.”

That, in case you didn’t grasp it, is a not-too-subtle allusion to the flood of Haitian migrants that ended up in America under Biden and became a campaign issue. Obviously, between that and calling Stefanik’s stance for border security “campaign rhetoric,” Kaine was looking for a walk-back.

Thankfully, Stefanik didn’t give him the pleasure.

“I wanted to just point out, I stand strongly for border security and that was what the you referenced was related to. And I would point out that in the sector I represent, the Swanton Sector, there was a Border Patrol officer killed in the last 24 hours,” she said.

She was referring to Border Patrol Agent David “Chris” Maland.

According to WPTZ-TV, he was shot and killed in Coventry, Vermont, during a shootout after a traffic stop Monday involving a German national and a third individual currently in custody.

Kaine then decided he was going to retcon what the Democrats really meant about border security when Biden’s administration recorded millions of encounters with those who illegally crossed the border and were caught by Border Patrol.

“Are there any Democratic senators that you think are for open borders and mass amnesty for illegal, uh, undocumented” immigrants, Kaine asked. (Nice save there, Tim! Almost called them what they really are.)

I mean, one wonders if this is a trick question; it’d be quicker to name the Democrats that aren’t. Stefanik was diplomatic but firm, noting that “Democratic think-tanks” and others were certainly in support of that notion.

Kaine interrupted to ask if there were “any Democratic senators you would level that charge against.”

Well, duh: “I think there are Democrat senators who have supported open borders,” she said. “We just had an overwhelming popular vote for President Trump where border security was top of the mind, so I do stand by my rhetoric standing up for strong borders, and the American people overwhelmingly support that.”

Kaine went on to say, after his time was up, that “the notion that Democratic senators are for open borders and allowing illegal aliens to vote is a fantasy … now I have questions about if you’d call for a fantasy. I’m going to have to ponder that.”

Maybe, while he’s pondering that, he’ll get to pondering why that’s not a fantasy. I doubt he’ll think that deeply though.

Now, of course, illegal aliens can’t vote — unless they’re given amnesty and then citizenship, in which case they can.

If you think this is far-fetched, consider that Biden pushed for amnesty for illegals at the beginning of his ill-starred term until he realized that had, more or less, the same level of GOP and public support as a bill mandating abortion-pill vending machines in every middle-school cafeteria.

As for open borders, please. The only time the border crisis was at the front of Democratic lawmakers’ minds was when they realized, far too late, that the voters actually cared about the influx of illegal immigrants — and not just some insane “basket of deplorables” foaming-at-the-mouth MAGA regressive demographic that only existed in the febrile liberal mind, but pretty much most of the sensible American electorate.

For a few months, then, the left pretended to care about it, although no Democrat — least of all anyone in the Senate or the White House — did anything substantive on this issue.

The only “fantasy” on display was the idea that the Democrats lost the border issue because of false “campaign rhetoric” about their policies.

And to think that Hillary Clinton thought this oblivious ideologue was a decent choice to serve as her veep.

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