[guest post by JVW]

It’s getting to be such that down is up and up is down. Per National Review Online:

Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas waived 26 federal laws Wednesday, allowing border-wall construction in south Texas to resume under the Biden administration for the first time since former president Donald Trump left office.

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Mayorkas wrote in the notice.

The new construction project will add an additional 20 miles to the border wall in Starr County, Texas, which has been reported as an area experiencing “high illegal entry.” Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, in which the county is located, has seen over 245,000 illegal migrants enter the U.S. through that area during fiscal year 2023.

Among the 26 laws that the DHS waived included the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, all notable environmental laws that limited further construction of the wall. The project will be funded by a congressional appropriations package from fiscal year 2019, the notice stated.

Wait, an appropriations package from 2019? My God, Donald Trump did get the wall built after all!

Future historians are going to marvel when looking back on illegal immigration policy in this country for the past 50 years. Democrats have been happy to fight tooth and nail against any attempts to prevent waves of immigrants crossing the border when it was swelling their future constituencies, but once the effects of lax southern border policies started appearing on the streets of New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and other progressive Eastern redoubts, why suddenly it became an unmanageable problem that at long last needed to be addressed. The bus caravans sponsored by Texas Governor Greg Abbott were perhaps exploitative in many ways, but they appear now to be one of the most effective political gambits in recent memory, at least in terms of getting results that mere weeks earlier seemed highly implausible.

Do not forget that Joe Biden declared an end to the Trump Administration’s border emergency when he became President in early 2021, telling the nation that “Building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.” During the 2020 campaign he had promised that “[t]here will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” So it goes for the biggest blowhard to ever occupy the Oval Office (and yes, that includes his predecessor).

Imagine if the GOP wasn’t busy pissing all over itself. Why, the Democrats’ border cynicism might even be covered by CNN (as of this moment, no coverage of the Mayorkas announcement) or the New York Times (brief article about the border situation here but no mention of the new barrier construction). To its credit, the Washington Post did see fit to cover this important development, even though it makes the Democrats look as craven and opportunistic as we always knew them to be. The WaPo must really want Biden out and somebody else topping the ticket next year.

Joe Biden is running out of things to lie to us about.

– JVW