Over half of the states—and the number is still growing—are now supporting Texas Governor Greg Abbott in his battle to control illegal immigration and to end the Biden administration’s disastrous policy of open borders.
A statement issued by Abbott on January 24 begins, “The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States.” The governor then ticks off the constitutional violations committed by Biden, which includes this paragraph:
Under President Biden’s lawless border policies, more than 6 million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border in just 3 years. That is more than the population of 33 different States in this country. This illegal refusal to protect the States has inflicted unprecedented harm on the People all across the United States.
The governor is being conservative in his estimation of 6 million illegal immigrants. Counting got-aways, the number is much higher.
Abbott then notes that “James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border.” After citing the requisite clauses from the Constitution, the governor concludes that “the Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Given the Biden administration’s deliberate and outrageous disregard of immigration restrictions at the border, Americans should be grateful to Governor Abbott and those who have taken this stance alongside him. Regrettably, the costs of this invasion are already immense. Tens of thousands of Americans have died from drugs brought across the border, countless numbers of children have been trafficked, and the Mexican cartels behind these criminal activities daily gain more wealth and power. In addition, the millions of illegals who have streamed across our porous border have stretched our social services. What many Americans fail to appreciate is that the financial and social costs of this invasion will last for decades, possibly generations, to come.
In his essay “Americans Are Fighting for Control of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist,” Brian McGlinchey gives an excellent synopsis of the growth of the octopus-like tentacles of our federal government. The anti-Constitutional expansion of federal control and power, he demonstrates, has deep roots in our history. The politicians and bureaucrats who today connive to ban gas kitchen stoves in their laughable attempts to control the earth’s climate are only the most recent members of that gang that has killed our future with trillions of dollars of debt, ruined our educational and health systems, wreaked havoc on our laws, and engaged us in 70 years of often pointless wars, none of which were legally declared, as the Constitution demands.
In best-selling author Mark Helprin’s latest novel, The Oceans and the Stars, the commander of a small U.S. Navy warship, Capt. Stephen Rensselaer, gives some of his junior officers a short lesson in the meaning of the Constitution. He explains that the phrase “In Order to form a more perfect Union” refers to “the relationship and agreements among the states that allowed them to come together to form a country. … The union is the mechanism that enables the states to accommodate each other’s interests and come together in the federal structure that has become a country.” In other words, as Rensselaer implies, the Founders never envisioned or intended the out-of-control deep state that now has charge of this country. As McGlinchey writes in his essay, “Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.”
To believe that this government leviathan will reform itself and operate within constitutional limits is akin to believing the Easter Bunny is real. The politicians in Washington, Republicans and Democrats, will likely never eradicate cabinet positions and their bureaucracies or surrender the illicit powers they now wield.
Nor is it likely, as so many Americans hope, that the election of Donald Trump, or someone like him, to the presidency will bring about these changes. The deep state fears this possibility, as may be seen by the Biden administration’s attacks on Trump and MAGA Americans, but the odds are that those in power, that vast army of politicians and bureaucrats, will remain in power.
Our state governors, however, are another story. These men and women can legally invoke their constitutional authority to demand change and have their demands met. If they stand fast against the federal overreach and open borders, then perhaps a victory on that battlefield will encourage them to restrict further the regulations and dictates of the Washington bureaucrats.
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Image credit: Public domain
