For much of Joe Biden’s presidency, a variety of Republicans have pointed to fentanyl seizures at the U.S./Mexico border as proof of lax security measures. That’s never made any sense — the claims are inherently self-defeating — but an amazing number of GOP officials have spent the last couple of years pushing the line.
This came up again yesterday during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, when Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed to the Biden administration successfully seizing fentanyl before it reaches American soil as evidence of the Biden administration failing to stop fentanyl before it reaches American soil.
That was, to be sure, quite weird, but it wasn’t the Georgia congresswoman’s only misstep. Greene also published this missive to Twitter:
“Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s [sic] from murdering Americans everyday [sic] by Chinese fentanyl.”
The tweet came with a video of Rebecca Kiessling, a Michigan woman who told lawmakers about losing two sons to accidental fentanyl overdoses.
But while Greene saw Kiessling’s tragic story as proof of the Biden administration’s policies, there was a fairly obvious problem with this attempt at blame: Kiessling’s sons died in 2020, when Biden was a private citizen.
And while I don’t imagine anyone was especially surprised to see that the right-wing Georgian hadn't done her homework, it was part of a curious recent pattern in GOP politics: Republicans keep forgetting who was president in 2020.
Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, for example, recently blamed Biden for “paying people to stay home” in 2020, referring to a law that Donald Trump signed the year before Biden took office.
The same week, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado blamed the Democratic president for Covid-related school closures in 2020 — which, again, was a year that Biden spent on the campaign trail, not in the Oval Office.
It also wasn’t too long ago when former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also pointed to crime data from 2020 to blame Biden for the U.S. murder rate, apparently unaware that it was her former boss who was president at the time.
If this dynamic sounds at all familiar, we’ve seen a similar problem before. As regular readers might recall, in 2015, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas suggested Barack Obama was to blame for the economic crash of 2008, which began several months before the Democrat was elected president.
Two years earlier, a poll found that nearly a third of Louisiana Republicans blamed Obama for the dreadful federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Of course, in reality, Katrina made landfall in August 2005, and Obama was inaugurated in January 2009.
Now, it seems much of the GOP has become calendar-challenged once again.