Beating the Dead Horse

The historic Catholic Church Trump would destroy to keep us safe from

 the brown hordes who...live on both sides of the border.

But I came across this Texas Observer article which I will mine for nuggets of interest to those who don't bother to read the whole thing:

Huge stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border aren’t practical corridors for smuggling or illegal immigration. A wall through the national park would be a hideous billion-dollar project to keep that one guy in Boquillas from bringing wire roadrunner sculptures across the river in the morning to sell to hikers, and would negatively affect predominantly poor communities on the border, whose existences are fragile and often dependent on neighbors across the river.

The heaviest-traveled sections of the border already have fencing. If the president simply wanted to bolster those, he wouldn’t have needed to fight anybody. For better or worse, those barriers have been expanded by Democrats and Republicans over the years, and are uncontroversial in Congress. Indeed, Congress provided additional funding for that system of fencing in Trump’s first term — construction in South Texas is slated to begin in February.

But neither is the expansion of those fences inconsequential. The people who live in these areas have been more or less absent from the national debate — on the matter of The Wall, some in the media seem more interested in irate Trump-supporting steelworkers in Ohio than the people it would actually affect. The Texas borderlands are already a police state, and about 95 percent of the Texas-Mexico border is privately owned.

That last sentence is why I keep talking about the 5th Amendment.  There is no "emergency" that's going to clear the land for immediate construction.  Even if Congress doesn't have standing to sue to overturn Trump's expected (though he's talking about it too much, usually a sign from bullies that they don't want the consequences of their actions) declaration, landowners all along the Texas border can demand their day in court, and how many Federal judges are going to give the President carte blanche to suspend the Constitution?

And just to associate myself with these words, I repeat them:

Are conservative pundits mad about any of this? No, of course not, they’re defending Trump in this new fight. Dan McLaughlin, a columnist at the National Review, recently tweeted a defense of The Wall that captures the ridiculousness of their thinking on the matter: “The Vietnam Memorial Wall is also a wall. So is the Wailing Wall,” he said. “If you are against all walls regardless of purpose or function, you are against houses, churches & hospitals.”

These are the words of a man whose brain cavity is filled with pea soup. McLaughlin isn’t even pro-wall, really, he understands that it’s a garbage policy. Just as he professes to dislike Trump, who last night took the same tack when he asked a national television audience why rich people have fences if walls don’t work. But McLaughlin is incapable of being less anti-lib than he is pro-the-people-who-make-libs-mad. The left’s new anti-wall stance, he continued, was “an interesting test case in how hard people will circle the wagons around demagogic nonsense from D candidates.” Hm!

"Hm!," indeed!