https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/19
Bismarck said that politics is the art of the possible. It looks like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and other Democrats regard politics as the art of intransigence.
In his brief remarks Saturday on border security, Donald Trump outlined a plan that made multiple concessions to Democratic desiderata in exchange for $5.7 billion to fund 230 miles of the wall along the southern U.S. border. Indeed, the president’s plan deliberately took cues from some Durbin’s own legislation on the subject.
Didn’t matter. Pelosi said the president’s plan was “a non-starter.”
Before rehearsing the specifics of the plan, let’s note two things. First, as the president himself noted, his plan is meant as the first step in addressing a national crisis. The crisis has two parts. One is humanitarian. The hordes pooling at the U.S.-Mexico border attempting to gain unlawful entry to the country are taking huge risks. According to the president, one-third of the women making the journey North are subject to sexual assault; some observers put the figure even higher; some mothers, Trump said, provided their girls with contraceptives in preparation for the journey. Many of the children, most often brought along by adults, are also frequently subject to abuse. Some of those banging on our southern gates are hapless people just seeking a better life; but many are hardened criminals or aspiring terrorists.
The second part of the crisis concerns national security. The southern border is a huge conduit for dangerous drugs and dangerous thugs. Moreover, the sheer number of Hispanics seeking entry to the United States has already affected the demographic profile and character of large parts of the Southwest. This is a subject that was eloquently anatomized by Victor Davis Hanson in Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. That was several years ago and the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years.
