Monday, August 22nd, 2005...6:24 pm
I’m All For It If They Build It Along the Gila Instead
State Rep. Russell Pearce has proposed annother one of his incredibly practical solutions to our state’s border woes. He is drafting a bill to call for a referendum to ask for new taxes and fees to raise $580 million to build a wall along the border.
($580 million! Wow, we could use that to give away to, I dunno, people that claim that their cars run on alt-fuel or something.)
That’s somewhere around $1.7 million per mile. I would go into a rant about all of the things that we could spend $1.7 million on, but the fact is, Pearce and his ilk don’t care about such things.
What strikes me most is the impracticality of the whole thing. So, we want the state to build this thing. It can only be built on state land, or on private land if we get permission. Since Pearce is abandoning his conservative principles and now is for tax increases, maybe this also means now he has no problems with takings either. Maybe he thinks the state can bully their way into building it on private land.
Roughly one fifth of the length of the border is the Tohono O’Odham nation, with a large chunk of the rest taken up by Organ Pipe Monument and the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range. These are under the jurisdiction of federal and tribal governments, who are probably not the least bit interested in having the state build a wall across their land, and there isn’t much the state can do to force this to happen.
Okay, lets just assume for a minute that somehow the this thing actually gets built. So, now what? People will not cross, I dunno, thirty miles east of Douglas? Maybe just across the Colorado River?
This is just another example of a totally unworkable “solution” proposed by Pearce. Last session, he moved through a bill forcing local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws. The bill, of course, provided no money to our already stretched local law enforcement agencies to do this. I guess Pearce and his friends are not so much against “unfunded mandates” anymore either.
Pearce spends his time on this dog and pony show, and has the nerve to say that Governor Napolitano is grandstanding on the issue.
NB: The Arizona Daily Star ran an editorial last week on this issue.
Yes, I re-ran the picture of RSL’s Rusty Pierce. It is a joke only I find funny, but that is enough.
9 Comments
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:18 pm
I thought the picture was funny now that I’m in on the joke. But Pearce himself is an even bigger joke.
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:46 pm
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August 22nd, 2005 at 9:48 pm
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August 22nd, 2005 at 9:49 pm
People are already dying in record numbers trying to get in here. You think a big concrete wall will stop them? Did you ever hear of a ladder and a rope?
And when it fails, what exactly more does he plan to do? Suggest we put up guard towers every hundred yards with guards who have orders to shoot to kill a la the Berlin Wall (of course, people found all kinds of creative ways to get over, under, through and around that one too).
I guess he thinks that only Americans have ingenuity.
August 22nd, 2005 at 11:17 pm
A good title for Pearce’s project would be:
Build it and they will come (anyway).
August 23rd, 2005 at 8:15 am
Hey Ted you see what Pat Roberts is calling for with Hugo Chavez?
August 23rd, 2005 at 3:59 pm
anonymous:
I just posted on it on my blog (http://tiodt.blogspot.com).
It is ironic that a ‘man of God’ endorses murder of someone he doesn’t happen to like (and a Democratically elected leader at that). What is scary is that some of the things that Pat Robertson was pushing and which were ‘way out there’ a few years ago (like writing discrimination against gay people into the Constitution) is now pretty much standard fare for the right wing.
August 23rd, 2005 at 9:02 pm
How bout we built a wall around Mesa that would keep out Russell Pearce, Eddie Farnsworth and Karen Johnson?
August 24th, 2005 at 8:52 am
Zelph:
I thought it would be better to deport them to Mexico without any documents and let them see what it feels like to walk back here.
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