OPINION:
A congressperson as the arbiter of national morality, the judge of what’s right and wrong, the earnest scholar of government theology? Who knew? Yet Nancy Pelosi says building a wall on the border is “immoral.” Ours is an age that mocks the values that created America.
The traditional mores that honor faith, family and freedom have been the earth beneath our feet, and now a new moral order championed by “progressives,” so called, is making the ground tremble. They answer “no” to the question of whether the nation has the right to preserve its territorial integrity on the southern border. A lot of others say, “yes we do.” Whether the United States long endures may hinge on the outcome of this tug-of-wall.
Democrats don’t want to spend the money for government operations that include a physical barrier to halt the tens of thousands of migrants pouring into the United States without permission every month. President Trump won’t sign legislation funding the government without it, so the federal government enters the fourth week of partial shutdown. The $5.7 billion at issue is less than half of what the government spends in a day.
Building the barrier would be, in the words of Mrs. Pelosi, “an immorality,” and her fellow Democrats agree. No twists of logic can produce the conclusion that rejecting a time-tested means of protecting Americans from interlopers is true to the oath lawmakers take to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The new morality ignores the duty to refrain from folding, spindling and mutilating the morality that works.
This redefining of rectitude rejects the fundamental right of Americans to go about their daily lives without encountering mischief from uninvited “guests.” Mrs. Pelosi concedes that the killing of a police officer, Ronil Singh, shot in December by an illegal migrant in her state of California, was “a tragic situation,” but she wants only to lament the deaths of two sick migrant children among the 24,000 smuggled into the United States in the month. Some deaths are thus more tragic than others.
Determining the views of the American public on the new morality is complex. Competing surveys show voter support both for the wall and against the wall. A Rasmussen poll last week finds that 52 percent of likely U.S. voters believe a border wall “is likely to slow or stop illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border,” and 45 percent doubt the effectiveness of a wall. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found a slight advantage for wall opponents, 47 percent to 44 percent.
The opinions of the public often make little impression on the politicians if they conflict with the opinions politicians hold. Democrats who previously voted in favor of an array of border security measures that included a wall — Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chief among them — now oppose any Trump-inspired barrier blocking the path of illegals. “The Democrats, which I’ve been saying all along, they don’t give a damn about crime,” the president tweets. Harsh, but hard to argue with. Democrats prefer to look past the pain of individual Americans abused by illegal migrants to open the borders to let in a rush of migrants who are likely, once legals and voters, to assist in helping in establishing Mrs. Pelosi’s greater morality.
The pell-mell rush across the border threatens to alter the demographic composition of the nation and lock in the permanent Democratic majority that would transform the United States into something like the places the illegal migrants have abandoned. Utopians always leave ruin in their wake. The ends rarely justify their means. But their greater good is a but a dream. America’s cities stand as crumbling monuments to the “progressive” model of the previous century. The people who already live here — former immigrants and descendants of immigrants all — are exhorted to provide sanctuary to waves of prospective Democrats and send the bill to the future.
This dangerous game of king of the hill is at sharp difference with the dream of America as “a city upon a hill.” When John Winthrop described his hope for the Massachusetts Bay Colony he dreamed of building a new world, not of tearing down the existing one. Far from a new morality, the Pelosi-Schumer vision is a scheme that would transform the city upon a hill to a ruin.
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