RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/01/28/theres_still_a_path_to_the_wall_139298.html

Those of us who care deeply about the 2016 movement led by Donald Trump should not equivocate about the near-term damage inflicted by last week’s political events. Though Speaker Nancy Pelosi controls only one-half of one-third of our federal government, her tactics, plus the unanimity of her caucus, imperil the central animating objective of the America First electoral ascent: The Wall.

In her Machiavellian disregard for the personal, economic, and national security of Americans, she correctly ascertains that allowing large-scale construction of Trump’s wall all but assures his re-election in 2020. After all, Trump’s leadership on the economy, judicial appointments, and a restrained foreign policy already more than justify another term. However, the unfinished business of border security remains a cornerstone of that goal.

Pelosi and her allies, therefore, have suddenly determined that physical barriers are “immoral” even though, for decades, Democrats gladly supported hundreds of miles of barricades. To paraphrase the words of their former Capitol Hill colleague John Kerry, they were for walls before they were against them. What Pelosi’s party actually stands against is … allowing a major victory for the president, regardless of the harm their obstinacy inflicts on American citizens.

Despite these significant obstacles, a path exists for the administration to both secure our country’s border and advance the 2020 re-election cause. But the coming days and weeks will be mission critical.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-trump-day-after-shutdown-ends-says-we-will-build-the-wall-11548538067?mod=hp_lead_pos1

President Trump showed no sign Saturday he was prepared to give up his insistence on a border wall, as negotiators prepare to begin talks aimed at keeping the government open and resolving a bitter impasse over funding for the wall.

On the day after Mr. Trump and congressional leaders reached a deal reopening the government for three weeks, Mr. Trump tweeted, “We will build the Wall!”

He also suggested underlying partisan divisions that set off the monthlong government shutdown remain in place, writing on Twitter, “both parties very dug in.”

Under the deal struck Friday, House and Senate negotiators appointed by congressional leadership will use the next three weeks to see if they can settle the dispute over funding for a wall along the Mexican border.

The president made the wall a central campaign promise and he insists that a physical barrier is essential to stopping illegal immigration and crimes that result from a porous border. Democrats hold that a wall is an ineffective solution and that any answer to illegal border crossings should be driven by evidence and expert evaluation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/come-all-and-receive/

The Democrats are routinely diluting the significance of citizenship

Gavin Newsom has big plans for California. Among his first acts as governor was to ask the state legislature to expand health coverage for illegal immigrants. California began offering insurance for illegal-immigrant children some years ago; now Newsom wants to raise the age limit for receiving subsidized health care to 26. “We will never waver in our pursuit of guaranteed health care for all Califor­nians,” he said in his inaugural address. That includes individuals residing in the state illegally.

Around the same time, on the other side of the country, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio offered a similar proposal. He wants the city to spend another $100 million on its shambolic public hospital system so that illegal immigrants are treated at clinics before they crowd emergency rooms. “From this moment on in New York City,” de Blasio said, “everyone is guaranteed the right to health care — everyone.”

The Newsom and de Blasio initiatives are more than your standard bleeding-heart social spending. Democratic politicians are beginning to act on the realization that they govern large numbers of people who, under the letter of the law, should not be here. Coastal and metropolitan Democrats increasingly represent individuals who cannot vote, do not pay income taxes, and are ineligible for military service and jury duty. This epiphany has led the progressive movement to begin to elide and subvert the distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Such policies do not simply undermine the rule of law. They erode our sense of national identity, our constitutional structure, and the idea of Ameri­cans as a self-governing people.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/walls-work-just-ask-this-community-college-on-the-southern-border/

Laredo Community College solved its illegal-immigration problem with an eight-foot-tall, mile-long fence.

One day last August, I was on a ride-along with the Border Patrol when we received a signal from one of Uncle Sam’s motion detectors: Illegal aliens were advancing towards the Rio Grande. We arrived at the scene within minutes. Unfortunately, they were already gone.

From their tracks, it looked like three to four people. Not too far from where we stood, there were several roads and houses adjacent to the river’s edge. The aliens had likely either been picked up by a waiting vehicle or disappeared into a nearby house.

More likely than not, they are probably still in the U.S.

My days with the Border Patrol were arranged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to which I had been assigned, and they served as an opportunity for me, as a new prosecutor, to get more familiar with the procedures, operations, duties, and responsibilities of the agency. The more I understood their job, the better I could do my job as a prosecutor.

http://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/senate-gop-unveils-omnibus-bill-fund-wall-reopen-government

Senate Republicans have released a $354.5 billion fiscal 2019 spending package that includes $5.7 billion for border wall construction as well as temporary relief for enrollees in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and immigrants receiving Temporary Protected Status.

The 1,301-page draft bill was released Monday night, and it includes parts outlined by President Donald Trump in his Saturday speech. It is expected to receive a vote in the Senate this week.

Democrats have already rejected the proposal, on grounds that the president should first sign stopgap funding to reopen the nine Cabinet departments that have been closed for the past month. They also oppose the three-year extensions of legal status for the roughly 1 million DACA and TPS recipients, which they argue ought to be permanent.

The measure also includes a three-year provision that would allow unaccompanied minors from Central American countries to apply for asylum, with the requirement that they apply while still in their home country. It would limit the number of minors who can apply for asylum to 50,000 annually. Of those applying, it would limit the number that can be approved each year to 15,000.

Additionally, asylum would have to be deemed “in the national interest,” and anyone previously granted asylum whose status was eliminated before receiving a green card would be permanently banned from the country. The provisions were already drawing the ire of immigration advocates on Twitter late Monday.

“This bill would be one of the single-biggest dismantling of America’s systems of humanitarian protections ever,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst at the American Immigration Council.

The lack of bipartisan support for the proposal virtually ensures that the partial government shutdown, which began on Dec. 22, will continue, as the 800,000 federal employees impacted by the funding lapse inch closer to missing yet another paycheck on Jan. 25. But the White House and GOP leaders are attempting to force a negotiation with Democrats, who have not yet offered their vision of what a border security package should look like.

“The President has proposed a serious compromise to end this shutdown,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby said in a statement announcing the package. “It would not only fund the government and secure the border, but also provide immigration reforms the Democrats have long supported.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-dreamer-pawns-11548103367

Democrats rejected Donald Trump’s compromise on immigration even before it was offered on Saturday, and that by itself should be instructive for the American public. Do Democrats want a deal to reopen the government and offer new security for more than a million immigrants, or do they want to use them as pawns against Mr. Trump?

On the evidence so far, the answer is the latter. Mr. Trump’s offer of extended legal status for young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children, as well as to Central Americans and others with expiring visas, would provide relief against deportation for hundreds of thousands.

Isn’t this something Democrats want, or at least profess to? Democrats have sent a million press releases claiming to care about the Dreamers, Haitians, and those fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. It’s true Mr. Trump has held out this offer before only to renege. But here’s a new chance to get Mr. Trump’s signature on a legislative fix, at least for some years, without relying on the vagaries of courts and executive orders.

In return Mr. Trump wants money for border security and his wall, but political compromise means both sides get something. The wall may be a poisonous word for Democrats, but the President has already walked back his original demands. He is now talking about “steel barriers at high-priority locations,” not across all 2,000 miles. A fence of some kind already exists across 700 or so miles, the Administration is building another 115, and Mr. Trump wants to build another 230.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272623/trumps-border-wall-deal-rebuffed-dems-matthew-vadum

President Donald J. Trump extended an olive branch to Democrats on the weekend, conceding much of their immigration policy agenda in a bold longshot bid to move forward with building a southern border wall and ending the nearly month-long partial government shutdown but left-wing lawmakers rejected his overture even before he addressed the nation on TV on Saturday.

Trump’s address came after a particularly frosty week in Washington.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) informed the president he would be unable to deliver a State of the Union Address in Congress because the money wasn’t there to provide security. Trump countered by canceling a decadent junket Pelosi and other fat cat lawmakers had been planning overseas. At the eleventh-hour, while lawmakers and their guests were en route to a military airport to fly away, the president deprived them of the use of U.S. military aircraft.

Anticipating Democrat criticism, Trump said on TV, “walls are not immoral,” adding that a wall “will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.”

“This is not a concrete structure from sea to sea,” he said. “These are steel barriers in high-priority locations.”

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

On Friday, June 12th, 1987, President Reagan visited West Berlin.

Standing upon a platform, overlooking the wall which the Soviets had built to keep East Germans from escaping to freedom in the West, President Reagan chose to utter words that electrified the world. Addressing Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, he said: Mr. President, “Tear down this Wall.”

Here was a wall which, since 1951, had kept hapless souls from escaping Soviet occupied East Germany. But today there is an urgent need to build up a wall on America’s southern border – not to keep people in but to keep trespassers, drug traffickers, dangerous terrorists and violent gang members from illegally infiltrating into the United States of America.

President Trump has outlined the danger that stalks the southern border and imperils America’s very sovereignty as an independent nation state. He has praised the border agents who hourly face violence from brutal criminals as they repeatedly and illegally cross the unprotected border. But this alarming fact does not phase the likes of Pelosi and Schumer or of the growing extremists within the ranks of the Democrat party. The Democrats simply will not work with President Trump and they are willing to ignore the humanitarian and national security crisis that exists and grows daily.

President Trump has stressed again and again the towering need for a wall on the southern border to prevent a tide of illegal aliens from imperiling U.S. sovereignty and bringing with it misery, violence and death.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272576/congress-earns-nero-award-fiddling-while-america-michael-cutler

President Trump has decided to not sign off on the federal budget until it includes money for a physical barrier to finally secure the dangerous and highly porous U.S./Mexican border from the un-inspected entry of aliens and cargo.

That tough decision has been a long time coming.

With no budget, nonessential sections of the government have been shut down and some federal employees deemed “essential” are working without pay.

As a former federal employee I can certainly empathize with those federal employees. I recall working without pay when prior partial government shutdowns occurred.

Many pundits and “political analysts” have said that the administration should compromise. As things now stand, there is nothing to compromise about. Any “compromise” with Pelosi and company would only compromise national security. That “compromise” has been ongoing for decades and we have all too many dead bodies that prove how dangerous open borders are.

The media is focused on how many days federal employees have gone without pay, but no one is keeping track of how many years our borders have failed to prevent the entry of narcotics, weapons, criminals, terrorists and foreign workers who displace hard-working Americans and drive down the wages of those who are fortunate to keep their jobs.

The mainstream media has reported, as part of coverage about the impact of the partial government shutdown, that some TSA employees have failed to report for duty, thereby causing delays at airports as long lines of travelers wait to be screened by the diminished workforce.

Certainly there is not much that can be done when TSA personnel don’t show up for work. After all, no one would want to board an airliner unless all passengers and their luggage are carefully screened.