Auctioning off border security
Conn Carroll
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Sometimes it seems that President Joe Biden’s immigration policies are driven more by spite than any rational thinking — spite toward former President Donald Trump, that is.
For decades building a border wall between Mexico and the United States was a bipartisan priority. No one built more miles of the existing border wall than President Bill Clinton.
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But sometime around 2016, right about when Trump made finishing the border wall one of his signature policies, all of a sudden, adding one more single inch to the already 649-mile barrier between Mexico and the U.S. became one of the most racist things a politician could possibly do.
So when Trump left office with over 1,000 “square structural tubes” for the wall purchased but not yet installed, instead of completing construction with the materials already purchased, Biden put them in storage at a cost of $130,000 a day and almost $47 million since Biden became president.
Seems like it would have been cheaper just to finish building with what the government already had.
Nope.
Now, instead of resuming construction, the Biden administration is auctioning off the remaining uninstalled pieces of the wall. It has already sold 81 lots for just pennies on the dollar and has over 1,000 left to go.
What if, instead of selling the construction materials for a loss, the government sold them to border states willing to pay to finish the wall? Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) would be more than happy to take the “square structural tubes” off the federal government’s hands and turn them into a working border wall.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) have introduced the Finish It Act, which would do exactly that. The legislation would not force Biden to build a wall he does not want to build, but it would allow border states to purchase already paid-for wall material from the federal government to complete construction of the border wall on their own.
“Instead of securing the border, President Biden is auctioning off taxpayer-funded border wall materials for pennies on the dollar,” Ernst said. “He cannot avoid Congress’s accountability and must use these parts for their intended purpose. Build the wall and finish it!”
With illegal border crossings rising again last month, Biden should at least consider letting states finish building the wall for him. Unfortunately, that too seems to make too much sense.