Once upon a time, U.S. border security was an important concern!

The disgraceful chaos at the southern border is a topic of great concern to sensible Americans. It is a given that nations need secure and impenetrable borders, and levelheaded people understand that. And sometimes border policies and practices need reworking, such as after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“Unbelievable as it may seem to us today, it was only 15 years ago — with the 9/11 terrorist attacks still fresh in our minds — when Congress came together in a bipartisan effort to pass the Secure Fence Act of 2006.” That comment came from Mark Morgan, in a speech delivered this past July at Hillsdale College. 

Morgan served as acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Trump administration, and as chief of U.S. Border Patrol in the Obama administration, and provided details on this action. “The Secure Fence Act directed the Department of Homeland Security to take appropriate actions to achieve ‘operational control’ over U.S. land and maritime borders to ‘prevent unlawful entry.’” The measure had the support of 80 of the 100 U.S. Senators.

“It defined operational control as the prevention of all unlawful entries into the U.S., including terrorists, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband,” he continued. “And it specifically set the goal of providing ‘at least two layers of reinforced fencing, installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors.’ It added thousands of Border Patrol personnel, mandated the acquisition of new technologies, and resulted in the construction of more than 650 miles of physical barrier along the southern border of the U.S. between 2006 and 2011.”

With those actions, the southern border became even more secure than it had been, sparked by concerns of additional terrorist efforts to kill Americans. And Morgan noted that there was substantial support for this action in the Congress before and after those actions were taken. 

In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama said: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.” 

And Senator Chuck Schumer said in 2009: “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple … People who enter the United States without permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who enter the U.S. legally.”

And then there was this comment: “Let me tell you something, folks, people are driving across that border with tons, tons — hear me, tons — of everything from byproducts from methamphetamine to cocaine to heroin, and it’s all coming up through corrupt Mexico.” That comment was voiced by then-Senator, and current President, Joe Biden, in 2006.

But since that time, something has happened. Congressional Democrats seemingly no longer care about security at the southern border. “Some attribute the breakdown of the bipartisan consensus on securing the border to the fact that Democrats came to look on illegal immigrants as much-needed Democrat voters,” Morgan said. “For whatever reason, a decade later these same Democratic leaders were lambasting President Trump’s border wall policy as ‘immoral and ineffective,’ even ‘racist,’ and fiercely opposing any and every serious proposal aimed at enforcing immigration law.”

“One of the most ridiculous criticisms I’ve heard.” Morgan noted, “is that the wall is ‘a fourteenth century solution for a twenty-first century problem.’ The same could be said of the wheel, which also still works pretty well.” 

In the minds of at least some of today’s Congressional Democrats, the tighter and more successful border security methods of the recent past are immoral and ineffective, and trying to prevent drug dealers, child traffickers, and terrorists from entering the country is racist. Brilliant!

One of the most effective and sensible programs dealing with illegal aliens crossing the border was called the Remain in Mexico Program. It required people illegally entering or being smuggled into the country with a minor to be returned to Mexico as opposed to being released into the U.S. with only a date for a hearing that most ignore.

Joe Biden, almost as soon as he drew a breath after being sworn in, canceled the Remain in Mexico Program, replacing it with the senseless “catch and release” method that existed prior to the Trump administration’s successful alternative.

Now, however, according to Morgan, “In response to a lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General, a federal judge has recently ruled that the Remain in Mexico Program must be reinstated, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to overturn that ruling.”

This may be the best thing to occur in the Biden administration’s brief but catastrophic tenure, and Biden had nothing to do with it, other than to have cancelled it early on, and opposed its reinstatement.

It is projected that 1.7 million illegal aliens will enter the U.S. in 2021. Border Patrol documents show that more than160,000 illegal aliens have been released into the U.S. since March, often with little to no supervision.

These illegal aliens have not been vaccinated, and they have not been vetted. What could possibly go wrong? 

Need we even ask that question?

Celebrate the good that’s happening and fix the country’s problems

That President Donald Trump has many critics is no surprise. That he has created much of the negative feelings people have for him is also no surprise. One interesting question is, “how much of the anti-Trump fervor is legitimate opposition to his agenda, or a true belief that he is unsuited for the job, and how much is just an emotional reaction to his personal behavior?”

His pugnacious style, attacking those who criticize him, and fighting back against those who attack him, is at the root of much of the negative sentiment towards him.

Genuine dislike for Trump, some of that from hurt feelings, seems to be what drives most – or at least much of – the bad feelings toward him. So, if Trump can be fairly accused of obsessive behavior that drives much of the negative sentiment, are his detractors not also behaving obsessively?

Some abandon their professional ethics and standards, saying, in effect, “Trump made me do it.” And that attitude has taken its toll in the field of journalism, which has been severely damaged of late, and elected representatives and senators shirk their responsibility to their constituents in order to focus on obstructing Trump.

Why not balance those negative emotions with earned appreciation for the good things that have happened and are happening during Trump’s tenure as president, the strong economy being a major factor? Are these folks so petty that they cannot admit that he is doing some good things?

For example: since Trump took office unemployment has dropped, currently at 3.8 percent; we have the lowest unemployment rate in history for women, African-Americans and Hispanics; there are more job openings than there are unemployed Americans, seven million job openings and six million unemployed; the number of those counted as outside the labor force tumbled by 487,000 in 2018, asworkers who had become discouraged and dropped out of the labor force are coming back.

He has eliminated many regulations that impeded economic progress; tax cuts have further spurred the economy and resulted in people keeping more of their earnings; wages are going up with Real Weekly Earnings up 2.6 percent; manufacturing added more jobs than government, reversing the Obama trend; some companies that left the U.S. have returned, bringing jobs back; and the GDP growth rate is up.

Why not focus on fixing problems that the nation faces?

The Left largely sympathizes with the undocumented immigrants – that’s “illegal aliens” for the non-politically correct among us – and denies that the tens of thousands sneaking across the southern border and the tens of thousands more who have over-stayed their visas comprise a crisis. Trump, on the other hand, understands that it is a crisis, agreeing with the federal immigration workers and those states that have to try to deal with this senseless situation. 

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, instead of doing its job and helping to revise outdated and flawed immigration laws and procedures to help protect the country and the constituents that elected its members, plans to investigate Trump some more.

The Left’s favorite narrative is that these people are fleeing dangerous conditions, or are just looking for a better life. Of course some, likely most, are. There are proper ways of doing this, and sneaking across the border is not one of them. But others are sex or drug traffickers, robbers, rapists and murderers. 

All of those groups – both those having the best intentions, as well as those with the worst – have one thing in common: they are in the U.S. illegally. Why is any true American willing to allow this to continue?

And while the mainstream media has successfully downplayed this situation, the problem is much worse this year than last. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reported on its website, “According to U.S. Border Patrol (CBP), in six and a half months their agents have apprehended more than 418,000 illegal aliens, which surpasses the total for FY2018. In the last six months, CBP has encountered more than 3,000 fraudulent family units. And CBP had apprehended almost 1,000 illegal aliens, mostly family units, before 5 a.m. on April 16.”

“Anti-enforcement politicians and Democrats in Congress reflexively blame the Trump administration or Central American dictators,” the report continued. “Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Jay Inslee (Wash.) even blamed the crisis on climate change.”

While we know that the Russians attempted to affect the 2016 election, as they have in previous elections, there is no evidence that anything they did had a real effect on the outcome. Therefore, Trump was properly elected as president under the electoral system that our Founders designed, and that has worked for well over 200 years.

There is important work to be done that is currently being delayed largely by the obsession to obstruct Trump, and ultimately remove him from office. Those things include: reforming our immigration system, straightening out the shambles that are the healthcare system, paring down the size and cost of government, and continuing to reduce harmful regulations. And these areas affect all Americans, Republicans, Democrats and everybody else.

Finding satisfactory solutions to these problems requires everyone’s good intentions and honest efforts. Now it’s time to get to work.

Politics, not qualifications, will decide the Gorsuch nomination

Senate Democrats are doing the Stanky Legg Two-step in order to dance away from confirming a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court who is a federal judge provably as devoted to following the U.S. Constitution and the body of federal law as any nominee in many years.

Judge Neil Gorsuch, whose record on the bench of the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals is as nearly perfect as one can hope to achieve, is precisely the type of judge the Founders had in mind when they wrote the Constitution, a man in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia, whose vacancy he has been nominated to fill.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gorsuch said his law clerks had compiled information about his ten years on the bench of the 10^th Circuit, which covers about 20 percent of the U.S. He has participated in more than 2,700 appeals, 97 percent of those cases were decided unanimously, and he was in the majority 99 percent of the time. How much more mainstream can one be?

His record clearly identifies him as a mainstream appellate judge, as has the American Bar Association, not an ideologue, or someone who plays favorites. Nevertheless, an exercise designed for confirming a qualified person to sit on the nation’s highest court has devolved into a political war.

U.S. law is a system of rules that govern behavior. Rules and laws must be followed and not following laws has penalties. In the U.S. laws are not static; they can be amended or repealed, but they must be amended or repealed through a specific process. However, some people – primarily liberal Americans – believe that this process may be circumvented by the rulings of activist judges when laws get in the way of their inclinations.

Gorsuch’s adherence to the law is the primary objection to his nomination, although some say it is also because the Republican majority in the Senate refused to take up the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the seat Gorsuch is now nominated for.

This, too, points to a Democrat anomaly. A principle relating to this situation arose in the U.S. Senate in 1992 when then-Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who was chair of the Judiciary Committee, said on the Senate floor that filling Supreme Court vacancies “that would occur in the full throes of an election year,” must be held to a different standard. Citing “a majority of his predecessors,” Biden said that the president, George H.W. Bush, should delay naming a replacement, which would de-politicize the nomination, at least for a while.

In March of last year, “in the full throes of an election year,” President Barack Obama ignored the advice that Biden, who was then his Vice President, had offered on the matter years before and nominated Judge Garland. The Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., however, liked Biden’s theory, and would not schedule hearings for Garland.

Democrats want judges that decide legal issues on whether their decisions fit the passions of the moment or have their preferred impact on the people, and therefore disapprove of the necessity to appoint judges that follow the Constitution and the law.

Minority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is upset with Republicans over the Merrick Garland issue, and will therefore not vote to confirm the highly qualified and squeaky-clean Gorsuch.

He spent 20 minutes on the Senate floor urging his fellow Democrats to oppose Trump’s nominee. Gorsuch, he said, “was unable to convince me he would be a mainstream justice who could rule free from the biases of politics and ideology.” And he said that Gorsuch “is someone who almost instinctively favors the powerful over the weak, corporations over Americans,” Schumer said. “He declined to answer question after question with any substance,” he said, referring to Gorsuch’s refusal to express his political beliefs or to prejudge issues that may come before the Court.

Others have equally irrelevant objections:

** Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Cal.: "As U.S. senators, we have an obligation to also examine a nominee's legal approach and ask whether he or she considers the impact of those decisions on our society and the daily lives of our people."

** "I cannot trust that President Trump is acting in the best interest of our country or our democracy and that I cannot support moving forward with his choice for the court," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

** Virginia Democrat and former vice presidential candidate Sen. Tim Kaine explained that, “After meeting with Judge Gorsuch and reviewing his testimony and past decisions, I’ve observed that he has repeatedly taken an activist approach to cases involving a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her health.” Kaine clearly does not understand judicial activism.

Senate Democrats threaten a filibuster to prevent a confirmation vote and ending the filibuster requires 60 votes. With 52 Republican senators, that will require the support of eight Democrats, and will be difficult to achieve.

Following the lead of former Nevada Democrat Harry Reid when he was Majority Leader, Republicans can use the “nuclear option” to allow a simple majority vote to confirm Gorsuch. Majority Leader McConnell has pledged that one way or another, Gorsuch will be confirmed.