Last week, as Texans were told to raise their thermostats, unplug electronics and avoid running loads of laundry that might strain our state's fragile power grid, Gov. Greg Abbott decided the real infrastructure vulnerabilities were a couple hundred miles away.
"Texas will build a border wall in our state to help secure our border," Abbott intoned Wednesday, surrounded by cheering Republican lawmakers eager to revive Donald Trump's border crusade.
No doubt Abbott is playing politics with his ludicrous gambit for Texas to build its own border wall, a half-baked GoFundMe effort. Although he is inviting private donations for the wall, the governor is using real taxpayer money -- moving $250 million out of the state prison budget -- to get the ball rolling, starting with hiring a project manager.
At his behest, officials have emptied the state prison in Dilley, about an hour's drive southwest of San Antonio, so the facility can be used to detain immigrants who trespass across fenced areas or commit other transgressions -- with Texas taxpayers funding that lockup, too.
And while Abbott says he wants to work with Texans eager to donate their land for a border wall, many landowners along the border have fought such a project for years -- meaning Texas would face years of expensive litigation if it tried to make a border wall a reality.
Texas has the largest stretch of unwalled border with Mexico.
The twists and turns of the Rio Grande aren't easily walled off. Doing so in some areas would block the flow of wildlife and cause flooding, likely violating a 1970 treaty that requires the Rio Grande floodplain to remain open to both sides of the border. Vast swaths of Texas' borderlands have formidable natural barriers that make man-made ones unnecessary.
Nonetheless, Abbott is pressing ahead with a project that would bear an exorbitant price tag -- $26.5 million per mile in some parts of Texas, according to federal lawmakers. Yet as this editorial board has repeatedly pointed out, a border wall will not stop the majority of immigrants who are here illegally, as they are people who came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas.
It will not stop the vast majority of illegal drugs, which are seized at guarded ports of entry, not from people slipping across unwalled borderlands. And it will not stop migrants from arriving and making their lawful request for asylum, which the courts ultimately sort out.
We recognize the spike in border crossings in recent months has strained South Texas communities. Sheriffs and ranchers describe human smuggling on a previously unseen-scale.
It is clear President Joe Biden's administration has not done enough to manage the problem.
The question facing Abbott is whether to reach out to the feds in an effort to help or exploit the situation for his own political gain. Lamentably, he has chosen the latter.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went even further, baselessly declaring that "we are being invaded" -- echoing the language of the gunman who shot and killed Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
This is not the path to making Texans safer. Instead of biting at Biden's heels with a rival plan for border security, Abbott should be tending to the needs of Texans.
We have a power grid that failed in February, killing hundreds of Texans, and even now the grid struggles to meet the state's energy demands. We have the nation's highest rate and largest number of people without health insurance. We have a network of highways, dams and levees that earned "D" grades in this year's infrastructure report card by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The governor should focus on those problems, and the needs of all Texans, instead of propping up his political ambitions with a wasteful border wall.