mycatharsis.com

That’s an awful lot for a border wall that will only cover 370 miles of a 1900 mile border.  And Republicans rampage across yet another abandoned constitutional principle, this time eminent domain.  A border wall that stops at the property lines of the wealthy and politically connected.

Just 69 miles north, Daniel Garza, 76, faces a similar situation with a neighbor who has political connections that reach the White House. In the small town of Granjeno, population 313, Garza points to a field across the street where a segment of the proposed 18-foot high border wall would abruptly end after passing through his brick home and a small, yellow house he gave his son. “All that land over there is owned by the Hunts,” he says, waving a hand toward the horizon. “The wall doesn’t go there.”

In this area everyone knows the Hunts. Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt and his relatives are one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library. In 2001, Bush made him a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where Hunt received a security clearance and access to classified intelligence.

Nice.  Again, this wall is apparently critical enough that it must destroy the property of hundreds of normal citizens, but not important enough to interrupt the lives of major Bush donors.  Do they really think we’re this stupid, that no one will notice the hypocrisy? I don’t think they think that, I think they just don’t care.  Whether it’s their refusal to submit to checks on their power from the legislative branch while insisting all citizens must submit totally to checks on their actions by their government, pardoning their own criminals while cracking down on everyone else’s, or building a border fence that stubbornly refuses to inconvenience their wealthy friends, this administration just does not care about any appearance of impropriety in their actions.  They really believe they are above the law.

“I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?”

It won’t.  But then again, stopping illegal immigration was never the point of the wall.  The whole point of the wall is simply to placate Bush’s tinfoil-hat base that he is ‘doing something’ about illegal immigration.  He’s known all along that a wall does nothing.  Garza’s home life and property is simply one of the eggs that must be broken to placate a bunch of angry nativists who can’t understand anything beyond “Big wall hard to climb over. Anything else amnesty”.  Extremely easy to walk around though, especially when it only covers a fraction of the border.  Or fly over.  Or swim around.  Or crawl under.  And 50 billion dollars to essentially build an immigration detour is considered chump change only by this administration.