There’s one place where the far left seems perfectly content with the U.S. government building a protective wall – and it’s not along the Southern Border, where there’s been a surge in undocumented immigrants since President Joe Biden took office.
It’s in Washington, D.C.
Security teams have essentially turned the nation’s Capitol – the symbol of freedom around the world – into a fenced-off, high-security forbidden zone that’s off-limits to much of the public.
And even the people who work inside have to pass through checkpoints just to get anywhere near the building itself.
“We’ve overdone it,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters, according to Politico, saying that Congress has “way overacted” to any perceived threat, and now Americans are paying the price.
“I’m extremely uncomfortable with the fact that my constituents can’t come to the Capitol,” he said.
The area around the Capitol is surrounded by a 10-foot steel fence with barbed wire running along the top and armed soldiers patrolling at the bottom.
“There’s all this razor wire around the complex,” McConnell said. “It reminds me of my last visit to Kabul.”
McConnell and a number of other lawmakers – mostly Republicans – called for changes to the security situation, and at least one Democrat now agrees.
“What we have now is unacceptable to me,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Bloomberg. “Currently, 10-foot fences with razor wire on top of it. It’s just ghastly. It’s an embarrassment. If there is a better way to protect us, I want to see it.”
The fences are visually jarring for a nation that likes to tout itself as the freest in the world.
“It looks terrible to have the beacon of our democracy surrounded by razor wire,” McConnell said.
But if any changes are coming, they likely won’t happen anytime soon: The Capitol Police has requested that the National Guard remain in control of exterior security until at least May 23, which the Pentagon has approved.
The Capitol Police is responding too-little, too-late to the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, which led to an unruly mob invading the building as Congress was tallying the results of the November election, delaying the process.
The sergeant-at-arms for the House and Senate were both replaced over the shocking security lapse, which is now under investigation by at least two Senate committees.
However, there has been no known public threat since then.
Security officials talked up a supposed “event” at the Capitol on March 4, and naturally blamed supporters of President Donald Trump.
But that day came and went with no protests or demonstrations, much less any kind of actual threat at the Capitol.
Yet the high security remains, as well as road closures and checkpoints for blocks in every direction, and strict limits on who can get to the building and how they can approach it.
Meanwhile, the problem at the border… where a wall could actually help… continues to rapidly spiral out of control.
February saw a spike in activity of 28 percent, with more than 100,000 people crossing the border, Customs and Border Protection announced last week.
The number of families has doubled… and the number of unaccompanied children tripled.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accused Biden of downplaying what he called a “crisis” and is deploying 500 National Guard troops to the scene, according to NPR.
Even the Biden administration is quietly admitting there’s a problem.
Ambassador Roberta Jacobson, the White House coordinator for the Southern Border, repeated a phrase in Spanish in multiple times during a recent press conference: “La frontera no esta abierta.”
That translates into “the border is not open.”
Based on the numbers, however, it looks like the border is pretty open.
The U.S. Capitol, however, is not.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.