The situation at the Texas border is getting more bizarre, and more dangerous. Now there’s a bunch of wackadoos with guns heading for the border to “help.”

A trucker convoy of “patriots” is heading to the U.S. border with Mexico next week, as the standoff between Texas and the federal government intensifies.
The organizers of the “Take Our Border Back” convoy have called themselves “God’s army” and say they’re on a mission to stand up against the “globalists” who they claim are conspiring to keep U.S. borders open and destroy the country. 

“This is a biblical, monumental moment that’s been put together by God,” one convoy organizer said on a recent planning call. “We are besieged on all sides by dark forces of evil,” said another. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. It is time for the remnant to rise.” (The remnant, from the Book of Revelation, are the ones who remain faithful to Jesus Christ in times of crisis).

Yeah, this is not good. On top of that, Texas is calling for “volunteers” to “defend” the border as well as National Guard from other states, and some states have sent Guard already. And they’re doing this in defiance of the Supreme Court and the federal Border Protection agents. I believe this really is as close to civil war as we’ve been since that little misunderstanding over Fort Sumter. See also Texas’ Border Stunt Is Based on the Same Legal Theory Confederate States Used to Secede.

The wingnuts want to see the Supreme Court overturn Arizona v. United States (2012), which you can read about here. As I understand it, the Court decided that states can’t enact their own laws regarding immigrants that conflict with federal laws. See also a good overview of the current mess at Vox and a timeline of the conflict so far at CNN.

I appreciate that President Biden is in a hard place here. How aggressive should he b here? He’s being told to federalize the Guard in order to neutralize them. There also are arguments (coming, I assume, from the Right) that he can’t federalize the Guard unless he can declare a national emergency. Seems to me Greg Abbott is creating a national emergency. Remember Hans von Spakovsky? I wrote about him back in 2007. Now Spakovsky is opining that President Biden doesn’t have the legal authority to federalize the Guard.  Current statutes require the president to seek the consent of a state governor to federalize the Guard, he says. But there are exceptions to that.

Under 10 U.S.C. § 252, the president can “call into Federal service the militia of any State” when “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Clearly, there is no insurrection going on in Texas as defined in that law. 

Nor is Texas violating any court order issued in “the ordinary court of judicial proceedings.” The state has been placing barbed-wire fencing on state-owned and private property, and no court has ordered Texas to remove or cease installing that fencing.

Didn’t the Supreme Court say otherwise? SCOTUS last week vacated an injunction that barred the feds from removing the razor wire Texas has installed in the Rio Grand. But the feds are still not being allowed access to the razor wire, which seems to me to defy the SCOTUS. And what Abbott is doing seems to me to fit the definition of “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, mak[ing] it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas Guard ito prevent Gov. Orval Faubus from using them to stop nine Black students from attending Little Rock High School in 1957, and he also deployed the 101st Airborne to Little Rock. In 1963 President Kennedy federalized the Alabama Guard to enable the integration of the University of Alabama. If that was legal, surely Biden’s federalizing the Texas and whatever else Guard is in Texas is also legal. Biden could order them to allow the feds to have access to the entire border and also keep the peace when the Meatballs for God show up in their trucks.

In what might prove to be a brilliant move to turn the tables — or not — President Biden is offering to shut down the border if Congress passes a bill currently in the Senate.

President Joe Biden urged Congress on Friday to pass a bipartisan bill that he argued would address an escalating immigration crisis, vowing to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.”

“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden wrote in a statement. “It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.” …

… The agreement would give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to expel undocumented migrants if the number of daily border encounters passes 4,000. That authority would become mandatory if the daily number surpasses 5,000 over the course of a week. 

Biden’s statement also called for more funding for “an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl at our southwest border.”

“For everyone who is demanding tougher border control, this is the way to do it,” Biden wrote. “If you’re serious about the border crisis, pass a bipartisan bill, and I will sign it.”

But Trump doesn’t want to make a deal, because he wants the border to remain an issue for the general election. So he’s ordered Republicans in Congress to not make the deal.

Republican front-runner Donald Trump said he wants to be held responsible for blocking a bipartisan border security bill in the works in the Senate as President Biden seeks emergency authority to rein in a record surge of unauthorized border crossings.

Trump’s remarks are being thrown back at him by the White House.

“Donald Trump demonstrated tonight he’s campaigning against solutions for the American people, and is actively rooting against America,” campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said after his speech. “President Biden is the only candidate focused on governing and addressing the issues the American people demand action on.”

So we’ll see how this goes. But now every Democrat in the Western Hemisphere needs to be pointing out that Biden offered to close the border and Trump opposed it.