Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a national treasure and heroine, and I believe she’s handling this crisis well. However, cracks are starting to emerge as centrist Dems start to suggest that it’s time for “compromise.” This is a mistake, but it stems in my view from a need for more clarity about why the wall is bad for America. We can debate whether there’s even a crisis, but that’s a different issue. I want to discuss whether the wall makes any sense on its own terms.
Speaker Pelosi has said that the wall is immoral, and we need to do everything we can to help make clear what that means. In a news conference she laid out some of the reasons why “compromise” doesn’t make sense. I summarize these in the first three points below, and then add two additional points that I believe need to be stressed when the media engages in its lazy both-siderism:
- The wall doesn’t secure the border. Drugs and potential terrorists (however defined) primarily come into the country at ports of entry — airports, coastal cities — not at the Mexico/US border.
- Money would be better spent on technology, such as scanners for drugs at airports, where the actual smuggling takes place.
- Money would be better spent on personnel — new hires to fill the many vacancies in the Border Patrol, Coast Guard and TSA — rather than on a wall that is in the wrong place (see #1) — ironically the shut-down has made these shortfalls worse and thus made us all even less secure.
- It’s not a compromise to build a wall (that makes no sense) just because the president learned during the campaign that it was an effective rallying cry — especially when there are better, more cost-effective ways to secure the border (see #1-3) — it is giving in to a hostage-taker’s unreasonable demands.
- Spending a fortune on something that makes no sense is certainly irrational, but it’s also immoral because it squanders tax-payers’ hard-earned money for no tangible result, when there are many needs and more important things to spend money on.
If the president had argued for a fleet of tricycles, or a herd of wild geese, to secure the borders, would the media be saying that Speaker Pelosi should compromise?
Surely our representatives, and serious media-makers, have a moral obligation to weigh whether something this expensive and intrusive makes sense, solves the alleged problem, and makes good use of tax-payer money, before they give in to it?
One more thing (which I heard when I happened to catch Rep Katie Hill being interviewed on msnbc last night) that can’t be stressed enough:
- If Trump succeeds in forcing Congress to pay $5.7 billion for a wall nobody wants — that won’t do what he says it will, and that makes no sense — by forcing pain on millions of Americans, it won’t be the last time; he will do it “again and again and again” (Hill says this around 5:04).
We must force republican reps and senators to explain why they support a wall that nobody wants, secures the wrong border, and wastes tax-payer money to satisfy a candidate’s throw-away campaign rally pitch.
Media members have been asking Democrats what they want in order to compromise. Why? It’s so clearly the wrong question to ask. Why aren’t they asking, instead, why anyone in their right mind would support the wall in the first place?
Republicans need to answer this question.
No more free pass for Republican hostage-taking!