They're Not the Same

 

Rare sighting of ocelot mother and kitten near Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, via MySanAntonio.

So, the latest Biden-is-the-same-as-Trump story, on the subject of wall-building:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday defended his administration’s decision to waive 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow for construction of roughly 20 miles of additional border wall, saying he had no choice but to use the Trump-era funding for the barrier to stop illegal migration from Mexico.

Asked if he thought such walls work, he said flatly, “No.”

The new construction was announced in June, but the funds were appropriated in 2019 before the Democratic president took office. Biden said he tried to get lawmakers to redirect the money but Congress refused, and the law requires the funding to be used as approved and the construction to be completed in 2023.

Leading to frenzied denunciations of the president on the platform formerly known as Twitter for breaking his campaign promise not to engage in any wall building on the southern border:

 

Biden waving more than a dozen environmental laws to build more border wall. Democrats are no better than Republicans. Vote Green. https://t.co/puw1cRFmei pic.twitter.com/4ahEDjYuQp

— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) October 5, 2023

Which he actually did not do, or did only under compulsion, as you can sort of figure if you read down to the end of the third paragraph, though the story isn't altogether told even there.

But it's the first nine words of the lede sentence that are making me crazy: the claim that Biden made a "decision" here and the news being that he's come out to "defend" it. (And to be honest I don't think it was "to stop illegal migration from Mexico" either, since it wouldn't have done that; I think it was to get Trump votes.)

The "decision" was in fact forced on Biden, pretty much as described in the third paragraph (not what "Biden said" the law requires but what the law does in fact require), by something I don't think I'd ever been aware of until a couple of hours ago, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which mandates that funding assigned by Congress to a particular purpose at a particular time has to be applied to that purpose at that time, unless Congress changes its mind.

The presidential power of impounding funds, first used by Thomas Jefferson in 1803 when he refused to release a sum of $50,000 on Navy gunboats (he'd wanted them in the first place as a defense against Spanish forces at the mouth of the Mississippi and once he'd bought the Louisiana Territory from Spain there was no further need, so he canceled the order in an early instance of deficit cutting), came into controversy in the Nixon administration, in 1973, when Nixon impounded somewhere between $12 billion and $21 billion in infrastructure spending, including $6 billion for abating water pollution under the new EPA (for which Nixon always gets all the credit, though he did have his problems with it) in the name of controlling inflation, and the Democratic Congress objected (it was even considered as a possible ground for impeachment). So the following year they passed the new law, a thorn in the side of all presidents Democratic and Republican ever since (the 1996 Line Item Veto Act doesn't fix mistakes made years before they come into effect). And that is why the Department of Homeland Security (not the president) made the "decision" to waive those laws, because they had to, in spite of its being, as Biden and others noted, a lousy idea:

Environmental advocates say structures will run through public lands, habitats of endangered plants and animal species like the ocelot, a spotted wild cat.

“A plan to build a wall through will bulldoze an impermeable barrier straight through the heart of that habitat. It will stop wildlife migrations dead in their tracks. It will destroy a huge amount of wildlife refuge land. And it’s a horrific step backwards for the borderlands,” Laiken Jordahl, a southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday afternoon.

It struck me it's a bit like a domestic-policy equivalent of the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021: Trump administration locks in a crappy plan (in Texas by legislation, in Afghanistan by diplomatic agreement), Biden administration helplessly carries it out because they have no choice—and also because they're competent: if Trump had been reelected, he never would have left Afghanistan, and many US troops would likely have been killed because of it (instead of the 13 killed in reality along with 170 Afghan civilians by the Taliban's Islamic State enemies); if Trump had been reelected, that 20 miles of wall would have had the same chance of getting built as the rest of the project, which was not good.

But no, Biden is not the same as Trump. This is a bad thing, certainly, as you and I and Biden all know, and it may well kill some ocelots too, but it's not Biden's fault. A functioning Congress could have stopped it; Biden can't. And the mainstream framing of the story is just garbage.