Throwing rocks at the wall
Democrats threaten more obstruction, but Trump invites construction bids
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Sunday, March 5, 2017
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, the poet Robert Frost wrote, but he never had to consider how an uncontrolled border works. Nevertheless, the Democrats, who regard the southern border as an ATM machine that dispenses prospective voters, vow to keep the funding for President Trump’s Mexican border wall out of any short-term spending bill.
With stopgap federal government funding set to run out April 28, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, says his party won’t support a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown if it includes money for the border wall.
That threat represents obstructionism akin to what Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” poses to the illegal border-crossers who thumb their noses at America’s national sovereignty, with the blessings of the Democrats. It takes serious chutzpah for Democrats to try to shift the blame for a shutdown. But they may get by with it, given the usual buckling of Republican knees when a Democrat in Congress or in the media cries “boo!” Fortunately, the threat does not intimidate Donald Trump.
The General Service Administration (GSA) issued a memo Feb. 24 announcing that the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection [agency] would solicit bids “on or about March 6” for the design and construction of “several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States’ border with Mexico.”
It’s clear that the government’s usual idea of “all deliberate speed” doesn’t apply here. The GSA, taking its cues from the man who has poured a lot of concrete, glass and bricks into the skyline of New York City, has applied an accelerated timetable that calls for “vendors to submit a concept paper of their prototype(s) by March 10.” That’s to be followed by a winnowing of applicants by March 20; those who survive the initial cut to submit full proposals, “including price,” file by March 24; and “multiple awards [are] contemplated by mid-April.”
The price of the border wall, estimated to be as much as $21.6 billion in an internal Department of Homeland Security report leaked to Reuters in early February, is a pittance by comparison. No one can put a price on the nation’s sovereignty. Unlike the 2009 “stimulus,” the border wall will quickly pay for itself in terms of the thousands of illegal immigrants it keeps out. Tens of billions of federal, state and local tax dollars will be saved annually by public schools not having to educate them, hospitals and emergency rooms not having to treat them, and jails and prisons not having to detain and imprison them, among other net costs illegal immigrants incur.
The nonpartisan Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated in 2013 “the annual costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local level to be about $113 billion; nearly $29 billion at the federal level and $84 billion at the state and local level.” Who does not shudder at that?
Ironically, there are Mexicans who are more supportive of the border wall than House Democrats here. Rogelio Zambrano, president of Mexico-based Cemex, one of the world’s largest suppliers of cement, tells the Mexican newspaper Reforma that his company would supply raw materials for the wall.
“We will gladly do it,” says Mr. Zambrano, whose offer is likely to draw a “thanks, but no thanks.” The president campaigned on promises to order all things “made in America.” Circumstances always alter cases, of course, but the good news is that the border wall is coming, and as the ancient proverb observes, “good fences make good neighbors.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...s-at-the-wall/
