The House finally got the border bill, H.R. 5230, passed in the last hours of a one-day extension of the summer session, cutting their normal month-long August break short by a day (God forbid any of our representatives miss their flights home).

The bill and its latest amendments provides $694 million for various purposes of border security, including $70 million for the National Guard, almost $200 million for HHS to provide housing to existing undocumented aliens, and $22 million to DOJ to help speed along the review and case process with more judges and (gasp!) video conference technology.

The funds would be transferred from existing money already authorized by Congress, from such critical programs like the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund, DOD Working Capital Fund, non-emergency FEMA money from prior years, and money under the State Department’s couches.

The bill also has a few provisions that make Obama’s DHS less able to implement DACA:  closing a loophole that did not offer children arriving from countries other than Mexico and Canada expedited hearings.  This allowed DACA to create an enormous backlog on the current system.  It would prohibit Interior and USDA from banning four-wheelers or other vehicles from protected land, keeping our Border Patrol from doing its job effectively, and it would authorize the Secretary of Defense to ban housing immigrants on military bases, especially if it interfered with the military’s mission or personnel.

Bravo!  Congress did something.  Something.

This bill has as much chance of becoming law as my bathtub faucet producing milk chocolate, but it does accomplish one thing:  exposes the White House’s insipid reaction, providing a useful backdrop to Obama’s inevitable “unilateral” action to grant universal citizenship to an entire class of people here illegally.

In an orgy of nonsense, the White House published a statement opposing H.R. 5230, for these reasons:

• H.R. 5230 also fails to provide the necessary resources for the Department of Agriculture to address imminent wildfire suppression and rehabilitation needs without resorting to damaging transfers from other critical forest health and fire preparedness priorities. It also does not include the bipartisan proposal for a discretionary cap adjustment to provide funding certainty in the future for these needs.
• H.R. 5230 does not include funding for the Department of Defense to support the Government of Israel’s request for critical missile defense needs.
• H.R. 5230 also waives important environmental protections for National Parks, National Monuments, and other public lands within 100 miles of the border for Customs and Border Protection activities.

If dog, rabbit*.  What does wildfire suppression, Iron Dome, and National Parks have to do with border security?  These have to the the most insanely incoherent reasons I’ve ever seen spew forth from the West Wing’s lunacy ward.  A president who’s willing to close every National Park, National Monument and water fountain in the country over a budget impasse is now worried about how the Border Patrol might clog the toilets?

The liberal spin machine is already hard at work turning this pile of incoherence into righteous outrage.  Then again, everything from the Left is righteous outrage.

Based on [the White House’s] statement it seems clear the White House is not willing to roll back protections for possible victims of abuse and human trafficking just to pass a measly funding bill.

It’s ironic that Republicans, who have cried foul over the imagined, criminal misdeeds of immigrant children, going so far as to allege that they’re terrorists and rapists, are intent on passing a bill that could gum up the system and allow real threats to remain in the country.

There you go, the trigger words programmed into every liberal’s head, like the Manchurian Candidate:  terrorists and rapists.  I don’t know about you, but I think even one rapist coming over the border is not a good thing.  The Left would agree on every college campus in the country, without due process, but if it’s a Guatemalan gang-member rapist, that’s ok.  And no, the bill wouldn’t treat every child like a rapist, yet listen to the media’s bullhorn and you’d think so.

As for terrorists, it took 19 of them to perpetrate 9/11.  If you think that no terrorists are coming over the border along with the thousands of undocumented aliens, you’re living in Unicorn-Rainbow land.  I don’t know how many terrorist cells have gotten in over the past two years, but any number is non-trivial.

But that doesn’t matter to the Left.  They will play the “children, rapist, terrorist” card on the GOP, and Obama will use his pen to sign orders in violation of the law, daring Republicans to impeach him.  Two words on impeachment:  President Biden.  Just no.  Even if it were politically possible, just no.

The only way we are going to extract ourselves from this endless tear in the fabric of rationality is to elect a Republican Senate and House this fall.  The fact that the House actually did something gives me more hope for that, and hope is a powerful thing.

*If dog, rabbit is a phrase my high school chemistry teacher used that indicated a logical disconnect between a hypothesis and conclusion.  It’s a more colorful way of saying “nonsense”.