Democrat Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke lost his bid for Governor of Texas against Republican Governor Greg Abbott in 2022. There is a political wall between the two Texans views on most issues, and of those issues is an actual wall — the controversial, incomplete wall between Mexico and the United States along the U.S. Southern border of Texas.
Until yesterday, President Joe Biden was on O’Rourke’s side of that political wall, separating himself from the policies of former President Donald Trump, who routinely makes chaos at the border and the construction of a border wall key components of his political campaigns.
1. Walls don’t work
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) October 5, 2023
2. President Biden promised he wouldn’t build them
3. Now even harder for voters to distinguish between him & Trump on border/immigration
4. Wasted opportunity to use executive power to actually fix our asylum system instead of impotent political posturing https://t.co/AQkxokNd2a
On Wednesday, however, the Biden administration “waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction on Wednesday, marking the administration’s first use of a sweeping executive power employed often during the Trump presidency.”
In jumping to the other side of the border wall debate in O’Rourke’s view, Biden now has made it “even harder for voters to distinguish between him & Trump on border/immigration.”
Nothing is stronger than a mother fighting to save her child.
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 28, 2023
Not a wall, not razor wire, not the next cruel contraption that Abbott and Trump dream up.
President Biden, you’ve made progress but as long as this is happening in our country there is much more for you to do. pic.twitter.com/wfPARgswXi
O’Rourke says Biden’s move is impractical — that “walls don’t work” — without fully acknowledging the political pressure Biden is under to take assertive action to quell mass migration at the border, which is probably, along with inflation, the President’s biggest vulnerability in his re-election bid. It’s pressure O’Rourke should be familiar with and sympathetic to — the perception of his own border waffling undermined his gubernatorial chances in 2022.
During O’Rourke’s run, Abbott campaign spokesperson Mark Miner said: “Beto continues to take different positions on issues depending on which part of the state he happens to be in.” O’Rourke served U.S. representative for Texas’s 16th congressional district from 2013 to 2019.
