When considering U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, was in the running to chair the Homeland Security Committee, his fevered support for now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy is seen in a whole other light.
Unfortunately for Crenshaw, who likened Republican colleagues holding out on supporting McCarthy to “terrorists,” his bid to lead the committee fell short on Monday, with U.S. Rep. Mike Green, R-Tenn., being tapped by the House Steering Committee as chairman.
Green said stronger border security will be a priority.
“For the sake of our national security and homeland security, we must secure our border,” the GOP lawmaker said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “We have no choice. We will empower our brave CBP agents to do their jobs and hold President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas accountable for the crisis that they created.”
A physician who did three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Green has previously called on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign over the crisis at the border, Fox News reported.
Green wrote in an op-ed last year: “The person responsible for ensuring the security of our homeland against all enemies, foreign and domestic, does not know if his policies allowed apprehended potential terrorists full access to the United States.”
As for Crenshaw, he attempted to do damage control this week after blasting the McCarthy holdouts last week.
“They are standing for notoriety. They’re standing for that extra news that because nobody ever cares about them and they’re frustrated by that, and they want that extra news that we know that we can’t give in to this because then they will always run the conference and they’ll just get another scalp and another scalp, whether it’s Boehner or Paul Ryan or then McCarthy,” he said during an interview. “Scalise would just be next and we all know it. We just can’t allow that to happen. That’s why those of us are saying like, look, you pushed us into this corner. So now we’re saying we won’t vote for anyone but McCarthy. That’s why we’re saying it, because we cannot let the terrorists win. That’s basically what’s happening.”
A former Navy SEAL who lost an eye fighting actual terrorists, Crenshaw would try to walk back his incendiary remarks during an appearance on Fox News.
“Look, I do not think these people are terrorists and to the extent that my colleagues took offense to that I’ve gone up to them and said, ‘of course I didn’t mean it that way.’ We were speaking in terms of a very difficult negotiation where sometimes you use a turn of phrase about not giving in to terrorists,” Crenshaw said.
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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