Tell me again why it’s so unreasonable to immediately reassess our refugee process, in light of the recent attacks in France.

#BREAKING Some attackers used refugee crisis to ‘slip into’ France: PM

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) November 19, 2015

Specifically, that claim comes from French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. For those following at home, French Prime Ministers are actually very powerful; I think that the job is somewhere around Speaker of the House-levels of power and influence, but it’s complicated. Certainly it’s not a ceremonial position. So if this guy is saying that terrorists used the crisis to sneak over the French border. it’s almost certainly because that’s what he’s been briefed.

Notice, by the way, that PM Vallis apparently did not say the terrorists all got in on fake Syrian passports.  We know that at least one had a fake Syrian passport, largely because they recovered it from the guy’s corpse; but Vallis could be just as easily merely intimating that the terrorists took advantage of the European Union’s stunning inability to manage its own border security. Certainly there will be a lot of hard questions being asked by the French; the real question is whether they’re going to be asking that of the EU, or just the Belgians. Put another way: I wonder what the French are thinking right now about this super-national state that they’ve signed up for.

Moving along… it’s interesting to see just how badly Barack Obama has miscalculated public opinion on this issue. To give you an idea: public opposition to the Syrian refugee program is at 53/28. To give you another idea: the House passed a bill that would pause the administration’s Syrian refugee plans… and it passed 289/137. That’s kissing veto override territory.

Mind you, [mc_name name=’Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’R000146′ ] thinks that he can filibuster it in the Senate. Maybe he can and maybe he cannot – there are some Democratic Senators up for re-election next year (read: ‘vulnerable’) – but even if Reid can go back to that well one more time it’s still not going to help his party in the long run. The central problem here for Democrats is that it’s perfectly reasonable to want to double- and triple-check our refugee asylum process, given the way that Islamic State just sabotaged the European version; worse, the Democrats know it.

Well. Most of them know it.  The man still officially running their political party apparently does not.  Which suggests that an amusing power struggle among the Democrats looms on the horizon.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, it is a little odd that the French are planning to take in more refugees anyway. I’m curious to see whether this commentary by Vallis represents a dispute inside the government itself, or whether opinions have shifted since yesterday, or even whether everything was properly translated into English in the first place. You sometimes don’t know, with these kinds of stories.