Another Week Of Your Federal Government In Action

September 10, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Does the federal government do anything noticeable these days other than use its vast taxpayer-supplied resources to grind down and persecute its political enemies? You already know more that you want to about things like: unprecedented criminal prosecutions against the former President; a Censorship Industrial Complex to bully social media platforms into silencing opponents; and wildly disproportionate prosecutions of J6 protesters. Here are a couple of examples for today that you may have paid less attention to:

Buoys in the Rio Grande River

The Biden federal government has nearly ceased all enforcement of the immigration laws at the Southern border, even as millions of settler colonialists (*) come across illegally each year. This has created a very difficult situation in border states, most particularly Texas, which has by far the longest border. In response, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has come up with something he calls Operation Lone Star, using Texas state police and National Guardsmen in various ways to help stem the tide at the border, which in the case of Texas consists entirely of a river, the Rio Grande.

In July Texas started installing in the river, at places known for large numbers of crossings, some large floating buoys designed to be difficult to get across. Clever! Here was suddenly a very low cost and easy to implement step that could go a long way to solving the problem. Below from the New York Times (September 6) is a photograph of an early piece of the barrier being installed:

 

But of course, within a few days a lawsuit had been brought seeking to enjoin Texas from installing the barrier. When I read of this, my first thought was, it must be the usual immigration activists trying to use the courts to get their way. But I was wrong. The plaintiff turned out to be none other than our federal government. From the New York Times, July 24:

The Justice Department filed suit on Monday against the State of Texas over its installation of a floating barrier meant to stop people from swimming across the Rio Grande. . . .

You would think that the federal government would be grateful to Texas for coming up with the idea, and even paying the expense. And anyway, what could possibly be the grounds for the suit? From the Times:

In the lawsuit over the buoy barrier, the federal government argues that Texas is in violation of a section of the federal Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act that prohibits the placement of structures in waterways without federal approval. “This floating barrier poses threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns,” Vanita Gupta, an associate attorney general, said in a statement announcing the suit.

The federal Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act? Actually, it’s the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899! 33 U.S.C. Section 403. Here’s the relevant text:

[T]he creation of any obstruction not affirmatively authorized by Congress, to the navigable capacity of any of the waters of the United States is hereby prohibited. . . .

So they’ve dredged up an 1899 statute that only applies if the obstruction affects the “navigable capacity” of some waterway. But does the Rio Grande even have any “navigable capacity” in the sense of being used for transportation along its length? I’ve never heard of anything like river barge traffic on the Rio Grande. Consider this from a piece in Scientific Research, December 2021:

Historically the river provided navigation, limited shipping and border security. There is a need to restore Rio Grande water levels to permit navigation shipping . . . . The river flow pattern is disrupted by hundreds of dams and irrigation diversions, which has left sections of the Rio Grande River dry.

That would seem to be saying rather clearly that there is no “navigable capacity” today on the Rio Grande to be obstructed. The statutory claim that the Justice Department has come up with is completely phony. Equally so for the other supposed basis for the suit given by Ms. Gupta, namely “public safety and . . . humanitarian concerns.” In the real world, people regularly drown trying to cross the river. If the barrier reduces the number of attempted crossings, it will almost certainly reduce, rather than increase, the number of deaths.

In other words, the federal government is showing as clearly as it possibly could that its goal is to permit absolutely as many settler colonialists as possible to enter the country, and the actual real immigration laws be damned.

Here are the developments so far in the case. Last Wednesday, September 6, a federal judge in Texas granted the government’s request for an injunction, and ordered the barrier moved to the bank of the river. The next day, September 7, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that order. The stay is only a very temporary one to give the appeals court a chance to hear the merits. So this could go on for a while.

Civil Rights Investigation of New College of Florida

On Friday (September 8), Christopher Rufo tweeted that he had been informed that the federal Department of Education had opened a “civil rights” investigation into New College of Florida, where he serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees. Rufo, a noted conservative and anti-woke activist, had been appointed back in January by Governor DeSantis to go in and clean up that school, which had drifted far, far, far to the extreme/crazy left.

According to Rufo, the civil rights investigation is in response to a complaint (complainant not identified) alleging that Rufo had “mocked and misgendered New College’s Director of ODIE [Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity?], after ze [sic] was summarily fired.”

Roger Kimball has much more today in a post at American Greatness. Excerpt:

[T]he Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into New College of Florida. Why? Have they excluded black students from the tennis team? Have they made Mexican stud[ents] sleep in the parking lot? Nothing so minor. No, this is serious. Put a pat of butter on that crumpet and listen: the former director of “DEI” (“diversity, equity, inclusion” for the innocents among my readers) has revealed that Chris Rufo, a trustee of New College, “mocked and misgendered” this creature after she (or so I am guessing) complained.

Serious stuff. Can a dawn raid from the Stasi (aka, the FBI) be far behind?

The whole affair is very deservedly subject to mocking. The problem for Rufo and New College is that these Education Department investigations can be very expensive and time-consuming to respond to. That’s the whole idea from the government’s point of view. My recommendation: adopt the Jordan Peterson strategy, and record and broadcast every contact with the DOE bureaucracy.

(*) Note on terminology. I’ve decided to try out the term “settler colonialists” in lieu of “migrants.” It’s one of those instances where two words that mean totally the same thing have opposite connotations, one being universally known as bad, the other as good. For example, consider that “salt” in your diet is bad, but “electrolytes” (same thing) are good. Or, “trans fats” are bad, but “margarine” (same thing) is good. There are plenty of other examples. Is there any reason that the people crossing the Southern border illegally are not fairly described as “settler colonialists”?