Morning Glory: An offer they can't refuse

Earlier this month the Senate rejected a "compromise" on the border and sent a bill to the House that funds Israel’s many needs following the 10/7 massacre, Taiwan’s defenses, weapons for Ukraine and a significant spend on America’s defense industrial base. Now Speaker Mike Johnson has to decide what to do with it because he needs more support from his Caucus than the bill as currently written garners from the House GOP caucus. The best strategy for the Speaker? Make everyone an offer they can’t refuse: Build the wall.

The key to getting the Supplemental passed lies in a Washington Post article from February 27, the headline of which tells the story: "The Border Wall Has Never Been More Popular."

The critical two paragraphs:

"Multiple recent polls have shown support for building a wall along the southern border creating a majority.

"Late last year, it was Quinnipiac University and Fox News polling that showed between 52 and 57 percent supported its construction. On Monday it was a Monmouth University poll that pegged support at 53 percent."

Those are eye-popping numbers because the wall is former President Trump’s signature issue, but the collapse of security at the border and President Biden’s shrugging of shoulders at the flood of migrants who have crossed the border since he became president has changed public opinion dramatically in Trump’s and the wall’s favor.

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Trump had the border under control by the end of his first term and has promised to do so again in a second term.

Biden, in the sharpest contrast of the campaign ahead, abandoned the policies that led to control of the border and eight million people entered the country without permission in Biden’s first three years. That number has likely now passed 9 million total "encounters" at the border —and that number does not include "got-aways": The illegal immigrants who do not enter through a port of entry and are never "encountered" by law enforcement anywhere. The "get-aways" include the cartels’ worst customers carrying the most fentanyl and the Chinese nationals who don’t want to be fingerprinted and then released.

It’s a mess. It’s a huge burden on all the states and cities flooded with migrants. It’s a threat to every kid who tries one pill because they think they have bought a Xanax online but it’s a knock-off laced with enough fentanyl to kill. And it’s a national security nightmare.

BIDEN, TRUMP TO MAKE US-MEXICO BORDER STOPS THURSDAY AS MIGRANT CRISIS ROILS ELECTION

Only 450 Chinese nationals were "encountered" at the border in Fiscal Year 2021. In FY 2022 "encounters" with Chinese nationals soared to 2,176. "In 2023, it ballooned to 24,314," according to NBC News and in the first quarter of FY 2024, estimates are that another 19,000 have already entered and the surge in this demographic is increasing.

That’s a national security issue of the first order. When the Soviet Union existed, do you think Ronald Reagan would have allowed 40,000 Soviets to enter the country and vanish into its interior? Of course not, but Joe Biden has done the equivalent of that by doing nothing.  

When discussing this Chinese subset of the migrant flood with three former national security officials from the Trump era this past weekend, they guaranteed me that tens of thousands of Chinese nationals don’t slip easily out of the Chinese Communist Party’s control. They are very alarmed that the vast majority of these migrants are military-aged men.

Whatever one thinks about sanctuary cities, or California extending Medicaid to illegal immigrants (at a cost of more than $2 billion annually to a state with a $68 billion dollar deficit) the reality is that Americans of all political perspectives save the hard Left have awakened to the fact that this can’t go on.

The border with Mexico is 1,954 miles long. 900 miles are considered "passable." When he left office, Trump was adding miles of Wall daily to try and get as much of the 900 miles of Wall needed built. But as soon as Biden was sworn in, construction stopped, and the film of migrants walking around the unfinished Wall or through openings created by the coyotes began playing. Americans noticed. They want The Wall and they want it now.  

With funding for most of the Supplemental already enjoying majority support in the House, how to pass the necessary bill? Tack on funding for the wall as well as language that makes it clear that construction is to restart and conclude in a matter of months. That will also require language in the new law that approves that construction "notwithstanding any other law or treaty with any nation or sovereign Tribe." That language blows past the obstacles to the Wall’s construction posed by the federal Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act while also mandating construction on tribal lands. This is America. We built the Interstate Highway system. We can build the Wall in a matter of months if the will, the money and the clear direction exist in the Congress.

Want the Supplemental? Build the Wall. It is that simple. 

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

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