There is no security crisis at the border

Tuesday evening, President Trump plans to tell the nation that the situation at the southern border is so extraordinarily bad, the only solution is to do something extraordinarily bad. He will be wrong on both counts.

The president has already taken one extreme step, forcing some 830,000 federal workers to work without pay or be furloughed because Congress wouldn’t accede to his petulant demand to spend billions of dollars on a bigger, longer wall along the border. In effect, Trump has taken nine federal departments and dozens of federal agencies hostage until he can force his will on the branch of government that, under the Constitution, holds the federal purse strings.

It’s not the first time that part of the federal government has shut down over a funding dispute between Congress and the White House; there were eight brief shutdowns during President Reagan’s two terms, most of them over fiscal matters. But Trump is now talking about upping the stakes to a degree never seen before — by declaring a “national emergency” and then claiming (perhaps spuriously) the power to fund construction of the wall that Congress refuses to build.

That would be a reckless and arrogant expansion of executive authority, and Trump should abandon any thought of it. Nor should he prolong the shutdown to try to force Congress to fund a wall that is rich in exclusionary symbolism but unlikely to have much effect on illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-wall-shutdown-20190108-story.html