Will The Third Time Be The Charm For Joe Biden?

In announcing his entrance into the Democratic presidential primary, former Vice President Joe Biden framed the 2020 race in apocalyptical terms, declaring that “everything that has made America America is at stake.”

Biden then advised Americans of the need to “remember who we are.” If the third time running is going to be a charm, Biden should first remember who he was at the beginning and the end of his political career and, more importantly, where his party is today on the defining issue of the time – immigration.

While it is hard to fathom, there was a time when Biden believed it was a “big deal” to violate immigration laws by hiring an illegal alien as a nanny. And it was a big deal when it was learned that Zoe Baird, President Bill Clinton’s attorney general nominee, had done just that.

In 1993, Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, so had jurisdiction over key Department of Justice nominations, including the top spot. Biden disclosed during Baird’s hearing that the two had spoken “at length” about what he considered “a serious matter” and one of concern to the American people.

“It is my impression, that it is not just me, but a significant portion of the population that finds your action [hiring an illegal alien]and the action of your husband to be, on its face, inconsistent with the responsibilities that you will have as attorney general of the United States to enforce the very laws that you knowing violate,” Biden told Baird.

“There are some who have indicated that this is not a big deal,” he added. “To me this is a big deal.

It was a big enough deal that Biden counseled the Clinton White House to pull her nomination, which they did.

Having failed in his first presidential bid in 1988, Biden took a second shot in 2008 stating support for building border fences, punishing employers who hired illegal aliens and getting tough with Mexico, which he blamed for the immigration crisis. But, he also was moving left on immigration issues.

In 2006, he voted against making English the official language and for allowing illegal immigrants to participate in Social Security. He also voted to provide states with grants for illegal alien health care and education.

His vote for the mass-amnesty comprehensive immigration reform of 2007 only presaged what was to come. But Biden was beginning to waver.

During a September 2007 Democratic primary debate at Dartmouth College, Biden said sanctuary cities were born of the federal government’s incompetence and that he would not “allow those cities to ignore federal law.”

Less than a year later, then-Sen. Biden voted to defeat an amendment sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that would have created a “reserve fund to ensure that Federal assistance does not go to sanctuary cities that ignore the immigration laws of the United States and create safe havens for illegal aliens and potential terrorists.”

As the Democratic Party ceded more power and influence to open borders and radical special interest groups, Biden happily went along in his role as Obama’s vice president.

Once out of office and decades after he took violations of immigration law seriously, Biden told an audience at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that illegal aliens, in essence, were already Americans.

“These people are just waiting, waiting for a chance to contribute fully. And by that standard, 11 million undocumented aliens are already Americans, in my view,” he argued.

But that may not be radical enough for the Democratic primary voter.

David Bier of the pro-amnesty Cato Institute, noted in a tweet that Biden “did vote for the infamous union-backed amendments gutting the guest worker program in the 2007 bill that doomed that [immigration reform]effort. He backed CIR as VP but served as the VP to the Deporter-In-Chief.”

Having officially entered the race, Biden’s record will be further scrutinized and debated. How Biden, particularly on immigration, is graded – or degraded – by Democratic primary voters should provide an accurate sense of just how radical the party has become on immigration and how much influence the open borders advocates really have.

Grab the popcorn.