Robinson: Congress has the power, duty to curtail the president

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was called out on one of the administration’s biggest lies by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Sanders went for the terror angle: “We know that, roughly, nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”

Wallace wasn’t having it. “Wait, wait, wait — I know the statistic; I didn’t know you were going to use it. But I studied up on this. Do you know where those 4,000 people come — where they’re captured? Airports.”

“Not always,” Sanders protested.

“At airports,” Wallace said. “The State Department says there hasn’t been any terrorist that they’ve found coming across the southern border with Mexico.”

A flustered Sanders finally had to resort to the administration’s standard way of responding to inconvenient facts, which is to lie: “I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming through airports. I’m saying that they come by air, by land and by sea.” Except that none have been caught trying to come by land or sea.

Sanders also claimed that drug trafficking was a reason for the wall; however, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, most illegal drugs coming in from Mexico arrive in tractor-trailers and other vehicles at legal crossings. And Sanders mentioned the throngs of Central American would-be immigrants arriving at the border; however, the great majority of these people are seeking asylum and present themselves, again, at legal points of entry.

Costly, disruptive

Trump knows that the wall is a costly and disruptive gesture, a demonstration project for his base — and nothing more. It isn’t designed to make the nation safer. Its only purpose is to shore up his political standing, especially with nativists who want to halt or reverse the “browning” of America.

We cannot require that our presidents be perfect. But we cannot accept the kind of divisive cynicism that Trump’s wall embodies. The new Congress faces many tasks, but its first order of business must be to fund the normal operation of the government — without wasting taxpayer money on a boondoggle whose purpose is to reinforce a paranoid fantasy of “invasion” by swarthy hordes.

We are at one of those points that Douglass feared. Another quote from the great abolitionist is instructive: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Congress has the power, the right and the duty to tell Trump: Enough. The madness stops here and now. This government was able to survive Andrew Johnson, and it will also survive you.