As I travel today to America’s southern border, my fellow lawmakers in both parties are obsessed over 150,000 Russians moving on Ukraine. It’s about the same number of illegal aliens that move into our country. Monthly.

I’m more concerned with America’s borders than Ukraine’s. It’s increasingly a lonely place to be, but I make no apology for loving my neighbors more than Russia’s.

America is a friend to liberty everywhere but a custodian only of our own. Today the D.C. uni-party will vote to ban Russian energy imports. I will not join them. Biden’s plan to replace Russian oil with Venezuelan or Iranian oil is needlessly foolish. It will make Americans poorer and less safe. My compassion for Ukrainians won’t force my hand to hurt my own people.

Biden hates American energy so much he would open energy production in Venezuela and Iran before Colorado and North Dakota. America Last, for sure.

And while Russian oil is indeed stained with blood, so is Iran’s, and so is Venezuela’s.

Hard-working Americans shouldn’t have to pay higher gas prices to support Maduro or Khameini over Putin – especially since Putin and his military get the money either way.

Gen. Richardson testified in the House Armed Services Committee this week that American energy payments to Venezuela would likely result in Venezuela buying arms from (you guessed it) Russia!

Russia is a revisionist power run by a gangster government which steals from its own people, rapes the environment, and deposits its lucre through its oligarchs in Swiss bank accounts and mansions in the Hamptons. It wants to redraw the map of Europe. In these and other dastardly endeavors it is not alone. There are many gangster governments throughout the world. Many sit atop natural resources we require.

There are few good guys in Eastern Europe. Ukraine is the third most corrupt country in the world, the most corrupt in Europe. Everyone is working an angle and none of them are thinking of America First. Nor, apparently, are our policy leaders.

Driving Asia’s largest energy producer into the arms of Asia’s largest energy consumer would create a Russia-China alliance that would endanger Americans far more than Russia’s brutal belligerence in Ukraine. China is our pacing challenge, not Russia.

I agree with Director Burns of CIA — we should not have had NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders.

It isn’t America First to make promises to foreigners we can’t and won’t really defend. It either creates security welfare cases or lures the well-meaning into false comfort.

Banning Russian energy imports asks poor and middle-class Americans to shoulder the burdens of Washington’s foreign policy blunders. It’s unfair. We can help Ukraine without hurting ourselves.

Russia isn’t Iran or Cuba. They are a nuclear power, and these sanctions increase the likelihood of nuclear war. My neighbors will go and fight that war — just as they always have and just as they always will.

Better solutions are available.

We can hunt down the assets of Putin and his oligarch cronies wherever they may be and sell those assets off and hold the funds in abeyance until such a point as the Russian people force their government to behave.

We can disrupt Russian espionage in the West with the latest in technology, tools which the Russians and Chinese are deploying against us to hurt Americans.

It amazes me that we are more interested in kicking Russia out of Ukraine than, say, South America and the Caribbean, where their influence grows.

We can increase American investment in rare earths designed to build the future of batteries.

Sadly, sanctions rarely play out as their architect’s hope. They mostly enrich the elites in bad countries and harm the vulnerable. If sanctions worked as intended, Cuba would be a Caribbean Garden of Eden, not a hellhole.

Today’s vote is short sighted. But what do we expect? Ancient politicians don’t have to think of the long-term consequences of their actions. Putin is 69. Biden is 79. Pelosi is 81. McConnell is 80. We are seeing the dangers of a world ruled by a gerontocracy.

The Soviet Union collapsed because its very old leaders were unable to think beyond the present. Let’s hope the same thing doesn’t happen to America.

Politicians react. Statesmen reimagine.

I know which one I want to be.