{"id":1763,"date":"2007-12-18T13:31:19","date_gmt":"2007-12-18T20:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=1763"},"modified":"2007-12-18T13:59:07","modified_gmt":"2007-12-18T20:47:07","slug":"congress-guts-the-fence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=1763","title":{"rendered":"Congress Guts The Fence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2180311\">Mickey Kaus writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Congress&#8217; <a name=\"fencegut\">Fence-Gutting<\/a>: Get the old gang back together one more time? <\/strong>Provisions buried in the huge omnibus spending bill about to pass Congress gut the program to build a border fence, according to Republicans&#8211;and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20071218\/NATION\/209889236\/1001\" target=\"_blank\">they appear to have a point<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The 2006 Secure Fence Act specifically called for &quot;two layers of reinforced fencing&quot; and listed five specific sections of border where it should be installed. The new spending bill removes the two-tier requirement and the list of locations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Defenders of the changes (i.e. Sen. Hutchison of Texas) argue that the Department of Homeland Security should have discretion to &quot;utilize limited resources.&quot; <strong>But the whole problem is that nobody trusts President Bush&#8217;s Department of Homeland Security. Or anybody&#8217;s Department of Homeland Security, for that matter.<\/strong> Whoever is president, DHS will always have a bureaucratic bias toward expanding its budget by employing more DHS personnel&#8211;e.g. border patrol agents&#8211;and less <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2151609\/&amp;#nonewjaguars\" target=\"_blank\">cheap, inanimate fencing<\/a>. They can&#8217;t be expected to stand up to the businesses and local interests and ACLU lawyers and diplomats who hate the fence and will always lobby against it.<\/p>\n<p>Shouldn&#8217;t the old &quot;yahoo&quot; coalition from earlier this year reform and bombard the Capitol with phone calls to get the House and Senate to drop the fence-gutting language? I say yes. <strong>a)<\/strong> The project seems doable&#8211;Dem Congressman are trying to appear tough on border security and are unlikely to cling to the fence-weakening provisions, Spitzer-style and <strong>b)<\/strong> if they backed down, it would provide a valuable deterrent demonstration for future politicians who try to sneak border-weakening provisions past the vigilant yahoo community.<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mickey Kaus writes: Congress&#8217; Fence-Gutting: Get the old gang back together one more time? Provisions buried in the huge omnibus spending bill about to pass Congress gut the program to build a border fence, according to Republicans&#8211;and they appear to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=1763\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,160,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration","category-mickey-kaus","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}