The Brecht Election: Do the People Choose the Leaders or Vice Versa?

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have been hitting the Harris-Walz campaign hard on our ongoing border crisis. No wonder. Last week, Americans were gobsmacked by the ongoing revelations of the dangers they are being exposed to by a government unwilling to follow the law of the land. I don’t know who wrote the line, but the campaign slogan that the Harris-Walz campaign is for “they/them” while the Trump-Vance campaign is for “you” is a bit of rhetorical genius. It doesn’t merely highlight the left’s penchant for supporting radical gender ideology to the extent that we’ve seen video of Harris endorsing publicly funded “gender transition” surgeries for prisoners. It also gets at the fact that keeping the Democrats in power means putting illegal immigrants before Americans who were either born here or followed the law in coming to this land.

The only slight tweak I would make is to occasionally phrase it thus: Trump-Vance is for “We the People.” The preamble to our Constitution indicates that it was established by “We the People of the United States” in order to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Yet, in refusing to take the measures necessary to keep We the People safe from crime, terrorism, and indeed the prospect of people who are not citizens voting, none of those five purposes of the Constitution is being achieved.   

Instead, what appears to be happening is injustice, domestic chaos, vulnerability to America’s enemies, provision for people who moved here illegally, and the blessings of liberty looking less likely for us or our posterity. Though Kamala Harris made a great show of getting to the border last week, and the Biden-Harris Administration, after three years and in view of an election, has finally put in place some measures to tamp down the flood of people coming across the border, Americans are realizing that these gestures are too little and too late. They are realizing that our situation looks a little bit like the one dramatized in the East German writer Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Solution,” in which “the Secretary of the Writer’s Union” had printed a flyer:

Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

A sovereign people gets to choose their leaders. With Democratic policies designed to allow for and even encourage mass immigration, it looks as though our current government has found the solution that is “easier” for they/them but not for us.

            Who are the they/them? This was the shocking news. Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R, Texas) had requested data from President Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about how many potential criminals had gotten through. On September 26, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Patrick Lechleiter finally responded. Gonzalez published the results on his X (Twitter) page. The long and the short of it is that ICE has “662,556 noncitizens with criminal histories” on its docket, and of that massive number, “13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS!” If one looks down the chart provided by ICE, one sees convictions and pending convictions for assaults (62,231 convicted and 42,915 pending), arson (792 convicted and 177 pending), sexual assault (15,811 convicted and 4,250 pending), and many, many more.

            Often, these people are members of serious gangs. In March, over 100 suspected members of the Tren de Agua gang were part of a massive assault on our border in El Paso, Texas. Texas National Guard members were attacked and barriers cut down. The response by our system? “Following the March melee, a judge dismissed charges against 211 of the migrants accused of rioting and then Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) let dozens of them go free into the US.” This is the same gang that has been taking over apartment complexes and neighborhoods across the country.

This is “merely” a plain old risk to the general welfare. What about the common defense of our country? For a regime purportedly so against Russia, it’s odd that the Biden-Harris Administration puts securing our border as such a low priority. Especially after reports last week that Russia is using Mexico as a hub for their espionage activity in the U. S. The persistent and false claim that Trump is “soft on Russia” or even “pro-Russia” needs to be dropped. A “pro-Russia” policy would be exactly the one that we have right now. A porous border allows Russians and other foreign adversaries to slip right in.

             Of course, our government has known this. FBI Director Christopher Wray was warning six months ago about the danger of terrorists coming across our border. Americans know that securing the border is a matter of national security and not “xenophobia” or “racism.”

            Yet, just as bad as these threats to our safety are the threats to our elections. The SAVE Act, which would have helped ensure there was no non-citizen voting by requiring government officials to certify citizenship of those registering to vote, was included in the Continuing Resolution that was voted down on September 19. The upshot of this is that we are likely to have a large number of noncitizens voting come November.

            How many? At The Washington Stand, Ben Johnson cited academic studies that predict between 1.5 million and 2.7 million illegal noncitizen votes will be cast. This isn’t quite electing an entirely new people, but it moves dangerously close to that direction. Johnson quotes James Agresti, author of one of the studies, on the attempts to debunk his and other studies showing this phenomenon of illegal voting: “the claim that noncitizens rarely vote is based on studies with absurd methodologies. For example, they measure the prevalence of this crime by merely counting convictions for it.”

            Ah, yes, and only those convicted of drug crimes are using illegal drugs.

            The reality is that such voting could tip both local and even national elections. Given our electoral college system, they might even affect the election of the President. It’s not a leap to think as Mississippi GOP Rep. Mike Ezell does. Johnson quotes him as saying, “The reason why [Democrats have] got that wide-open border is so they can get as many illegals in here and get them to vote, so they can dominate the American vote.”

            Americans realize that something is desperately wrong with our situation. They express what is happening in terms of an “invasion.” And no matter how often they are told such a term is wrong, they see it that way. Gang members who illegally rush a border look like an invasion. Hearing that foreigners who are not citizens are voting sounds like an invasion. Reading, as people did in the Minneapolis Star Tribune this week, that “27-year-old Officer Lesly Vera…became the first non-citizen to serve on the police force Thursday” definitely feels like an invasion. There is no greater way to make Americans feel as if they themselves are the aliens than to put noncitizens in authority over them.

            America has been a tremendously generous country in countless ways. We have benefited in the past from immigrants and we still do. All this is true. And yet, the mass illegal immigration that has been allowed over the last four years has broken down trust in our country in all sorts of ways. Anybody who has flown recently must think about the gauntlet of security measures we are subjected to even in flying within our own country. We must produce valid IDs—we were told that was a racist requirement when it comes to voting!—and we must be screened and patted down in ways that are sometimes deeply embarrassing.

And yet our own government has facilitated the entry of gang members, terrorists, human traffickers, drug pushers, murderers, and even spies coming into the U. S., using pathways that the Biden-Harris Administration has itself created. The New York Post reported this week that DHS sources told them that for the more-than-800,000 who’ve come in on these new legal pathways, there is “almost no vetting involved for most migrants, especially if their home countries — including Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba — refuse to cooperate with American law enforcement.” Add those to the numbers that ICE has verified are convicted or nearly-convicted criminals—who may well be voting.   

This is the Bertolt Brecht election. We are voting as to whether it’s We the People electing leaders or our leaders dissolving us in favor of a new people that includes, well, God knows what kind of criminals even if DHS doesn’t. We had better choose carefully.  

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.