In the Huffington Post yesterday, Representative Silvestre Reyes raised 12 highly-pertinent questions about Bush’s plan to station National Gaurd troops on the border. All of those are good questions, and as usual, they are the kind of thing that thinking people would ask and the Administration never bothers to. When you see someone such as Rep. Reyes raising such questions ~ which I myself am certainly not knowledgable enough to have asked, myself ~ you begin to get very, very worried about what this means for our immediate future.

For example, very little planning was done in terms of operations, many tasks for which we already have organizations within the military are being duplicated unnecesarily, and there appears to be every indication that Halliburton or some other corporation will be picking up the slack at what we can guess will be a sizable cost. Does this sound at all familiar?

The trouble is that this time, the problems won’t be in Iraq. They’ll be right here on our borders, in states with large Latino populations where it may not always be easy to differentiate between foriegners and citizens. Meanwhile, as Reyes points out, the National Gaurd troops on the borders are likely to be in thier regular two-week rotations. That means inexperienced people on the border with guns.

All of this would be bad enough if it were necessary; perhaps it even *is* necessary from the perspective of a huge immigration problem, but that’s not what this is about. This is political cover for persuing a policy that will splinter the Republican Party; this is the Bush Administration looking tough to make his Conservative buddies feel good, and it will be a failure.

Don’t be surprised, folks, but there’s not a thing going to be done about Immigration in this Congress. The Senate is passing a bill of which I approve in large part, but the House has passed an intractable “Enforcement First” bill that does not come close to parity with that Senate bill, and the House ain’t budging with the Republicans in power.? In fact, off-hand I’d say the whole thing is crap from the word go, anyway.? The Republicans are stirring up a hornet’s nest for the sake of keeping thier base in line where ‘06 elections are immenent.

This is our government at work.