ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
OPINION / COMMENTARY
Pennsylvania has a House Speaker who cannot bring herself to blame the people who flew planes into buildings for flying planes into buildings. Instead, on September 10 — one day before America marked twenty-five years since 3,000 of its citizens were murdered — Joanna McClinton stood on a panel with fellow Democrat legislative leaders from Delaware, Illinois and New York at Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia and found a way to make the anniversary about something else entirely: how mean America has been to illegal immigrants.
“Thank God we haven’t seen another plane go down in Pennsylvania,” McClinton said, before pivoting straight into the point she actually wanted to make. “But we also have to recognize that our policies are impacting our perception around the world.” She went further, describing what she called “the brutality of this federal government for almost two years,” and telling the room that when it comes to how migrants have been treated, “it’s been heartless.”
Read that again. On the eve of September 11th, the sitting Speaker of the Pennsylvania House stood up and told an audience that U.S. immigration enforcement — not the ideology that flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — is the thing shaping “our perception around the world.” She didn’t say it by accident. She said it deliberately, at an event about the anniversary, in front of cameras.
Republicans didn’t let it slide, and they shouldn’t have. State Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who’s running for Congress this cycle, went straight at her. “She used her time to actually denounce securing our border and saying that, somehow, the efforts to keep our country safe could lead to another attack,” Mackenzie told Fox News Digital. “She’s totally wrong. She’s answering to the far-left radicals and globalists. I would actually call on Joanna McClinton to apologize for what she said at that event.” He didn’t stop with McClinton — he called on his own Democrat opponent, Bob Brooks, to publicly condemn her rhetoric too. That’s a fair test. Let’s see if any Pennsylvania Democrat takes it.
State Sen. Scott Martin didn’t hold back either, telling McClinton on X that her energy might be better spent “sitting down and understanding the concerns of the families of the victims of that fateful day” rather than rhetorically fretting over how the world perceives American border policy. Dan Bartkowiak of the Pennsylvania Family Council put the question to her directly and publicly: “Are you suggesting that U.S. policies like immigration can somehow justify the hostility that led terrorists to attack us on 9/11?”
It’s not the first time McClinton has taken this line. She’s previously accused ICE of operating with excessive force, writing on X earlier this year that agents were “brutally hunting down, harming people every day — and now using deadly force,” and closing with “God have mercy.” Now compare that language — reserved for American law enforcement doing its job — to the tone she used for the actual anniversary of a foreign terrorist attack that killed thousands of Americans. One gets fire and fury. The other gets a passing “thank God” before she moves on to the real grievance.
This is what modern progressivism looks like when the cameras are rolling and nobody in the room feels like pushing back: even 9/11, the one day a year that used to be politically untouchable, gets folded into the immigration-enforcement-is-the-real-threat script. It’s worth remembering that under this administration, illegal border crossings have fallen to levels not seen in decades — a fact that undercuts the entire premise McClinton was reaching for. The border isn’t less secure. It’s the most secure it’s been in a generation. What’s changed is that a sitting Democrat Speaker apparently can’t say so without also implying the country had it coming in 2001.
McClinton hasn’t apologized. As of this writing, her office didn’t respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment, and Democratic legislators who shared the stage with her have been similarly silent. Silence, in this case, is its own answer. Pennsylvania voters deserve to know whether their Speaker actually believes securing the border makes America a bigger terror target — because that’s the position she staked out, in public, on the anniversary of the worst attack in the nation’s history.
Sources:
Fox News Digital
PoliticsPA
Broad + Liberty
Pew Research Center