January 30, 2019 10:58 AM UTC

Crow Calls BS On Trump's Border Troops

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• by: Colorado Pols

AP reports via the Aurora Sentinel:

The U.S. will be sending “several thousand” more American troops to the Mexican border to provide additional support to Homeland Security, Acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan said Tuesday, providing for the first time new estimates for the next phase of the military aid.

It’s a move that Aurora Congressman Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger, is calling part of a political agenda from the Trump Administration.

“I am concerned that our active duty military was deployed with an ill-defined mission that increasingly appears to shift to meet the White House’s narrative,” Crow said in a statement Tuesday. “Even more troubling, this deployment is seemingly at odds with testimony I just heard today from senior Department of Defense officials at today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing.”

More from Rep. Jason Crow’s statement yesterday:

Our military should never be used to advance a political agenda. Yet today we saw several thousand more troops deployed to the southern border, a decision driven by politicians and lacking a clear strategic plan from our national security leadership…

We need clear answers from the White House, from the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security regarding who is driving this mission. Those answers are paramount to making sure we are responsibly using our military and respecting the burden this places on our service members and their families.

Crow’s statement notably lacks the mealy-mouthed equivocation that typified the objections of his predecessor Rep. Mike Coffman to Donald Trump’s various misdeeds. In particular, Coffman was pinned for his last two years in office between his partisan obligation to support the Republican President, and preserving the veneer of “reinvention” on issues like immigration which allowed Coffman to survive in a district that has elected Democrats above and below Coffman on the ballot consistently since 2012.

Now that voters in CD-6 have resolved the political anomaly that was Mike Coffman, they finally have a representative who can, as the saying goes, dispense with the pleasantries.