Normally we have to wait for an election to be over before any of the dirty laundry begins to leak out, but as we've already learned, the 2024 presidential race is turning out to be unlike most other elections in many ways. One of the pressing questions that arose through 2023 and 2024 has been a topic of debate inside DC political circles. Even as the country was being overrun by millions and then tens of millions of illegal migrants, steadily driving down the popularity of the Biden administration, Biden never looked seriously at reversing that policy. But why? He could have reversed it with one swipe of the same executive pen he used to reverse Trump's policies, This week, Speaker Mike Johnson revealed what he claims was the real reason and I'll confess I never saw this one coming. (NY Post)

President Biden declined to restore the most effective Donald Trump-era border policy — and blamed America’s southern neighbor for the massive flood of migrants into the US, House Speaker Mike Johnson recalled Thursday.

Johnson (R-La.) told The Post in an interview that Biden, 81, refused to reverse course and reinstate his predecessor’s “Remain in Mexico” policy even after migrant crossings began shattering records in late 2023 and into 2024.

“‘Just do “Remain in Mexico” again,'” Johnson, 52, recounted his entreaties to the president. “I begged Biden myself, personally, to do that. And he said he wouldn’t.”

As I said, I had my own suspicions about this question. I assumed that Biden wouldn't reinstate any Trump-era policies because it would have looked like an admission of an error on his part and he simply didn't want to give Trump the satisfaction, But Johnson says that wasn't the case at all. He claims that he "begged" Biden to reverse the policy,  but he refused for an entirely different reason. He claims that Biden didn't want to reverse it because "‘Mexico doesn’t want that.'”

Since when is Mexico determining the immigration policies of the United States? The previous president (AMLO) didn't want the Remain in Mexico policy either, but Donald Trump played hardball with them and they caved. When pressed as to why he couldn't do the same, all Biden reportedly had to say was that "things have changed."

What sort of leverage could Mexico have had over Biden that they didn't have over Trump? We remain Mexico's largest trading partner by a massive amount. We hold the weight of the world over Mexico's head. Trump chose to leverage that advantage to get what he wanted out of them. Why was Biden unable or unwilling to do the same? If this were China or Ukraine we were ta.king about, we might suspect that Biden had been compromised in some fashion, but... Mexico? This simply makes no sense, but few things do when it comes to this administration. Just toss this one on the pile along with the other mysteries that may or may not be solved one of these days.