Politics Starts at the Border

SOMETIMES history plays as farce the first time around, which raises the question of what it might conceivably do for a second act.

While we have spent the last few years fretting and chattering and speechifying about a secure border, it has been Dennis Schornack’s job — as American head of the International Boundary Commission — to locate it. He has had his hands full.

Evidently swaths of our northern border have disappeared in the undergrowth; parts have not been seen in years. It falls to the commission to whack the weeds, prune the trees and generally to excavate a boundary for the most part established in 1783, when John Adams, Ben Franklin and John Jay sat down at a treaty table in Paris. That, anyway, was Mr. Schornack’s job until two weeks ago, when he was fired by the White House.

Mr. Schornack and his colleagues have been up against considerable odds. The agency has had a budget of $1.4 million to mark and maintain an obstruction-free zone of 10 feet along the American side of a 5,525-mile border. It is chronically understaffed and years behind; its maps date from the 1930s. The weapons in its arsenal are hardly the stuff of missions accomplished. We’re talking lawnmowers, chainsaws, machetes and canoes.

For several years now, Mr. Schornack has been crying poverty. “I’m not allowed to lobby, but I’m allowed to beg,â€