"If they don't screw it up, they'll take both the House and the Senate this year," said former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-Arkansas) on The Todd Starnes Show. "They'll pick up a few more governor seats – and they will have huge gains at the local level, state legislature, school board, county commission and city council. So, we are in for a banner year."
According to Huckabee, "the only thing that could really mess things up for the Republicans" would be that would be that they would not know how to manage a victory. "That would be a problem," he added.
One thing that may cause a problem between Republicans is Donald Trump. While the former president is still well-liked in many circles, Huckabee acknowledges that some office holders and candidates want to distance themselves from Trump because of his personality and tweets.
"There needs to be a real clear understanding that it's okay to disagree with Donald Trump's personality – but embrace his policies, for heaven's sakes," advised Huckabee, a presidential candidate in 2008 and 2016. "They were exactly what the country needed."
And the results were "just stellar," exclaimed the former Arkansas governor.
"I wish people would realize that there's no benefit in making Donald Trump the object of division within the Republican Party because, quite frankly, most Republicans still support him [and] would support him again if he ran," said Huckabee. "And the fact is that even those who don't like his personality and didn't appreciate his tweets would at least accept the fact that what he got done in a short, four-year period was simply staggeringly good."
A rotten root
One of Trump's most successful and popular policies was his handling of the border crisis and illegal immigration – an approach that Biden effectively gutted within hours of moving into the Oval Office. In fact, even before Biden took office on January 20, immigration policy watchers were anticipating he would launch into a full-scale dismantling of Trump's border policy, which had gone a long way toward curbing illegal immigration.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), tells AFN that Biden's handling of the immigration issue in 2021 was probably even worse than he expected. In fact, he writes that Biden's border policy may be 2021's biggest failure.
"… We knew there was going to be a surge at the border because essentially Biden invited illegal immigrants to come with the assurance that most of them would be let go," Krikorian explains. "But the numbers have really been quite remarkable: almost 1.7 million arrests in fiscal year 2021 at the southern border. That's the highest number ever recorded."
And while he suggests that everything that happened along the border over the past year was predictable, "the degree of it – how bad it was – is something that I was kind of surprised by," admits the CIS spokesman.
According to Krikorian, the Biden administration doesn't really think the American people have the right to keep anyone out. Their philosophy, he says, is "if you come to the border, we are morally obligated to let you in – and if you're already here, we are morally obligated to let you stay."
And that, he concludes, is the "root cause" that must be addressed – otherwise, little will change.
