Tantrum Toddler on a Tear

Lessee now, the Chickenhawk Bully in Chief is SO afraid of brown people (unless they’re rich, with bonus points for dictators) that he’s sacrificing the economy, wildlife, farms – you and me, to protect his ultra-delicate, snowflake self.

Preznint Temper Tantrum ("I can do it if I want”) is all fired up to seize private property for his wildly gratuitous, pointless wall. The wall will do nothing but hurt people, wildlife and the U.S. economy. But HEY, it’ll make him feel like the BIG man – it’ll be a towering and destructive monument to his grotesquely fetid, insanely hyper-inflated ego.

This began as his theoretical attempt to keep terrorists out of our country but he appears to be fine with terrorist exporting countries as long as they rent a lot of rooms at one of his hotels.  

If you are looking to create a fact-based policy for making the country secure against terrorism, focusing on immigrants will not provide the answer. (source)
~ Karen Greenberg, Center on National Security

Gerald Dickinson, legal whiz bang over at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (whose areas of focus include property, constitutional law, state and local government law) wrote that:

In trying to take land for the wall, the federal government would be held to time-consuming procedures that include consultation and negotiation with the affected parties — including private landowners, tribes, and state and local governments — before taking any action. Federal law requires the government to consult with “property owners … to minimize the impact on the environment, culture, commerce, and quality of life for the communities and residents located near the sites at which such fencing is to be constructed.” Then the government would need to declare a taking and undergo condemnation proceedings…. 

The takings clause [of the Fifth Amendment] also protects private landowners from uncompensated seizures. Owners who are subject to eminent domain to build the wall would have to receive compensation for its physical presence on their property. ...Determining just compensation is not easy in contested cases in which the land and property at stake are infrequently exchanged on the market. There are few other properties in the United States situated along an international boundary, some of which is already fenced, which makes fair value hard to establish…. (source)

This would take years to resolve AND add a shit-ton more taxpayer buckos (your money and mine – NOT Trump and his fellow felonious, tax-evading Richie Rich types) to pay all the lawyers needed to hassle this ridiculous piece of boondoggling feces out, to pay off the folks who actually own this land AND to deal with all the inevitable and varied, resultant lawsuits.

All that taxpayer (OUR) money that could be spent on education, healthcare, fixing our damn roads, public buildings and upgrading/greenifying our goddamn power supplies would be frittered away on a delusional old man’s vanity project.

Oh yeah and give a thought to the ocelots, black bears, jaguars and plant life who are gonna be poleaxed by Preznint Shit-for-Brains’ astoundingly shortsighted and racist fantasy.

With habitat fragmentation, the wall could cut off ocelot, as well as black bear, populations in Texas and Mexico from other members of their species, leaving some populations too small to persist. There would be further damage to plants if the pollinators and seed-dispersing animals that plants depend on could not cross the barrier. 

Scientists also expressed concern about another aspect of the project. Because the wall will probably not be built in the flood plain of the Rio Grande, it will have to be set back from the river, sometimes by more than a mile. This has the potential to damage the valuable riparian forest ecosystem along the river, cutting off organisms that need to get to the river…(source)

All I can say is – I’m glad Nancy-SMASH is back at the House helm!