Trump's attorney general pick thinks his dumb wall is a great idea

In a sad show of carrying Trump’s water, Attorney General nominee William Barr implied Congress should pay Trump’s $5 billion ransom for a border wall as a way to end the Trump shutdown.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Barr what he would say to the thousands of federal employees currently furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. Rather than speak to the hardships faced by workers who have gone weeks without getting paid, Barr parroted White House talking points about the need for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I would like to see a deal reached whereby Congress recognizes that it’s imperative to have border security and that part of that border security as a commonsense matter needs barriers,” Barr said.

The government shutdown started at the end of December when Trump threw a tantrum demanding billions of dollars to build a border wall. At the time, Trump boasted that he was “proud” to own the shutdown if Democrats refused to succumb to his partisan demands. Despite repeated efforts by House Democrats to reopen the government, Trump and his Republican accomplices refuse to pass funding bills to end the Trump shutdown.

When he was Attorney General for George H.W. Bush, Barr also advocated for building a barrier along the southern border. The Daily Beast describes Barr’s quest to build a steel fence along the border outside of San Diego. “Unfortunately for Barr,” they report, “the fence was an epic failure.”

“The deterrent effect of tens of billions of dollars in investments in Barr’s approach to immigration control never materialized,” Wayne Cornelius, a professor at the University California, San Diego, told the Daily Beast.

In follow-up questions, Klobuchar walked Barr through numerous Democratic compromises where funding for a wall was offered and rejected by Republicans. But Barr refused to give up on Trump’s talking points, saying, “The point is, we need money right now for border security, including barriers and walls and slats and other things.”

Barr’s wall failed before, and Trump’s obsession with a wall today is doing nothing but making life harder for hundreds of thousands of hardworking federal employees. It’s clear from just this testimony that Barr cares more about pleasing Trump than he does about the harm this Trump policy — or any Trump policy — may have on the American public.

Trump nominated another lackey to serve in his cabinet, and William Barr is living up to Trump’s expectations.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.