EDITORIAL: Biden betrays border by allowing further work on border wall

President Joe Biden is either a weak panderer who won’t stand up for his principles, or a two-faced liar with no principles at all. Many people might be reaching such conclusions as Biden betrays migrants, the border area and his own previous declarations.

While running for office, he condemned Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies and promised to reverse them, including the use of the Title 42 public health code to turn immigrants away.

On his first day in office in January 2021 Biden, with much fanfare, canceled Trump’s declaration of a national emergency upon which his policies were based. Soon afterward, however, Biden renewed Title 42 and other policies such as Trump’s stay-in-Mexico order.

Now Biden, who had denounced Trump’s border wall, last week authorized new construction in Texas, including Starr County. The administration is waiving about a dozen federal laws to make it happen.

“The money was appropriated for the border wall,” Biden told reporters Thursday. “I tried to get (Congress) to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They … wouldn’t.”

C’mon, man.

To help fund his wall, Trump took more than $8 billion from the Treasury Department, military and other accounts.

So why can’t Biden do the same thing?

The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 and again in 2020 that the president had the authority to repurpose money that Congress originally had allocated elsewhere — an obvious contradiction to a previous ruling that the president can’t veto line items during the budgeting process.

That decision was made against a Democratic Party president. So how could a Republican president cancel budgeted items after bills were passed and signed into law, and the money already allocated?

Biden could have — and should have — repurposed the border wall money for related uses, such as improving immigration processes and hiring more people to handle visa applications and judges to hear cases. Such a bold move would force the high court to either acknowledge all presidents have the same authority they gave Trump, or deny Biden’s authority and thereby prove that the court’s majority really is the bunch of partisan hacks many Americans already believe they are.

The president once declared that the wall “is not a serious policy solution” and a waste of money.

He was right. Government data show that the wall has been cut, broken and otherwise breached more than 3,000 times since 2018, and more than 100 tunnels have been discovered running beneath it. Moreover, sections of the wall have been blown over by winds in California and rendered useless by erosion near El Paso.

Spending another $1.4 billion of taxpayers’ money to resume construction, just because it’s there, makes no sense. That kind of thinking is the reason our government’s finances are such a mess.

If Biden really opposes the border wall, then he should rescind last week’s authorization, and show the kind of strength people expect from the person who presumes to be the leader of the free world. If, however, his inconsistent statements are mere political pandering, then he’s no better than his predecessor.

If he knows the right thing to do, then he should do it. Otherwise, he should just shut up.