Tag: hit&run

Fresh off proposing yesterday that private employers be required to provide their workers with 10 days of paid vacation, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio set his sights on a new target: property owners.

During his State of the City Address, delivered Thursday, de Blasio warned that the city will take action against landlord abuse, even if that means seizing private property.

“When a landlord tries to push out a tenant by making their home unlivable, a team of inspectors and law enforcement agents will be on the ground in time to stop it,” the mayor said. If fines and penalties don’t do the trick, then “we will seize their buildings, and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve,” he added.

But surely city officials won’t have the time to find and punish each one of the city’s bad landlords, right? Wrong. That’s because de Blasio is creating a new agency devoted solely to landlord abuse: the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“The city’s worst landlords will have a new sheriff to fear,” de Blasio said, calling the new agency (which he created on the spot by signing an executive order) a “new arm of city government that will root out the worst landlord abuse.”

As the New York Daily News notes, the city already has an Office of Tenant Advocate. However, it has not yet been funded, according to the Progressive Caucus of the New York City Council.

So what will the Office to Protect Tenants do? De Blasio didn’t really explain, though his executive order says it will serve as a “central resource for tenants, social service agencies, advocacy organizations, legal services providers, landlords and management companies of affordable housing, and others on tenant issues,” including “tenant harassment.”

According to his office’s website, De Blasio is “pursuing new local law to seize upwards of 40 of the most distressed multiple dwelling buildings annually and transition them to responsible, mission driven ownership.” Passage of this legislation would presumably give the Office to Protect Tenants the authority to seize land.

This is really nothing new for de Blasio, who basically told New York magazine in 2016 that he does not believe in the right to private property. “I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be,” he said. “Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents.”

There are a host of problems with this mindset, as Reason‘s Scott Shackford detailed at the time. But it all boils down to this: Politicians like de Blasio want to control what other people do with and on their own property. If landowners don’t listen, then there’s a simple solution: Seize their land.

This sort of thinking doesn’t work out in real life. Look no further than an existing New York City program meant to provide affordable housing. The Third Party Transfer (TPT) Program supposedly lets nonprofit groups buy “distressed vacant and occupied multi-family properties,” then rent them out to people in need of a relatively cheap place to live. But longtime property owners have complained that the city has seized their homes over unpaid city debts.

Consider retired nurse Marlene Saunders, for instance. She nearly lost her house, a completely paid-off brownstone worth upward of $2.2 million, over an unpaid water bill of less than $4,000. It was only after her local councilman stepped in that the city decided to let Saunders keep it.

The mayor’s announcement today doesn’t mean that program is going away. In fact, the mayor will actually look to expand the TPT program to meet its goal of seizing more land, according to Crain’s New York.

It’s worth noting that the worst landlord in New York isn’t even a private landowner. In December, then-NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, who’s since been sworn in as attorney general of New York State, put the city’s own housing authority at the top of her “2018 NYC Landlord Watchlist.”

De Blasio may have been alluding to this today when he said the Office to Protect Tenants “will hold every city agency…accountable for protecting tenants.” Still, it’s ironic that the mayor wants to seize private property when the real problems are happening in city-run buildings.

Nicole LaVeglia of Queens parked her car in a legal spot on January 2. Less than an hour later, the city’s Department of Transportation showed up, drilled a hole, and installed a “No Parking” sign near the vehicle. With the car suddenly in violation of the sign, the New York Police Department then towed the car and LeVeglia was slapped with $185 in fines.

Woman parks legally. 45 minutes later, workers show up, install no parking signs. Hour later, woman’s car is towed away.

A New York love story.https://t.co/YSQansfA8t

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) January 10, 2019

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), one of two increasingly lonely libertarians in the House of Representatives, had a crazy idea Wednesday morning in the wake of President Trump’s unpersuasive prime-time speech about border wall funding and the government shutdown: Have the House and Senate hash out a spending bill, send that bill to the president, and if he vetoes it, they can override, or not. “This is our system,” Amash tweeted, with the slightest hint of desperation. “We should follow it.”

What an intriguing concept, writes Matt Welch: Congress could do its job and ask the president to do his.

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Vermont’s commercial health insurers could save anywhere from $1 million to $5 million a year by importing prescription drugs wholesale from Canada, according to a new report from the state’s Agency of Human Services (AHS). Yet the report also says insurers—and thus patients—could save no money at all, despite the fact that name-brand prescription drugs cost less in Canada than they do in the United States.

Somewhere between $5 million and zero is quite a range. What explains the big spread? The short answer is federal regulation.

For Vermont, or any other state, to legally import prescription drugs from Canada, it must devise an importation system that the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will certify. To get that approval, said system must do two things:

• “pose no additional risk to the public’s health and safety,” and
• “result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer.”

“A program that costs more to operate than produces in savings,” the AHS noted in its Dec. 31 report to the Vermont legislature, “is highly unlikely to meet the Secretary’s criteria for certification.”

No state has received HHS certification under Section 804 of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act to import prescription drugs wholesale from Canada. No state has even attempted to use Section 804. The AHS report shows a few reasons why.

The certification process would require Vermont to devise a system of state regulations that federal drug regulators, who have vastly more experience and money, will sign off on. Vermont would need to hire and train staff who can license and monitor importers in the U.S., exporters in Canada, and any third-party contractors participating at any point in the supply chain. The state would have to physically inspect, either directly or using a third party, Canadian manufacturers, both to grant them export licenses and periodically afterward. Importers would also need to be inspected, drug batches would need to be tested, databases would need to be managed, and all parties would need to be audited regularly. Number crunchers would need to keep track of the savings (or lack thereof).

As of right now, the Vermont Board of Pharmacy is the state’s supervising body for the pharmacy industry, and “no sitting member has any experience to speak of in respect to drug manufacturing, the wholesale distribution of legend drugs, or supply-chain security.”

If Vermont can do all of that regulating for $800,000 a year, and importation saves the state’s commercial insurers exactly $1 million per year, would HHS deem $200,000 a “significant reduction in cost”? What about savings of $500,000? If Vermont feels the savings are significant, and HHS doesn’t, who wins? The Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act is silent on these questions.

The AHS prepared its report at the request of the Vermont legislature, which voted in May to begin the Section 804 certification process. The AHS surveyed commercial insurers, who forecast savings of “$2.61–$2.82 per member per month,” even with a markup as high as 45 percent (that’s where the $1 million to $5 million number comes from). The report also tells us that the agency understands broadly what it needs to do to regulate an importation system, but not how much regulating will actually cost, or whether licensing fees will pay for the additional regulation. The agency says it now needs to determine whether “the absolute cost of operating such a program and whether that cost eclipses the savings for participating commercial payers.”

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is vehemently opposed to letting Americans buy prescription drugs from countries with nationalized health care systems, and that industry has a lot of influence with HHS and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). When Vermont voted to begin the Section 804 process in May, a pharmaceutical lobbyist called the legislature “highly irresponsible.” I bet pharmaceutical lobbyists have read the AHS report and are devising their own regulatory suggestions that can be submitted to HHS. While I’m speculating, I’d guess those regulations will be very difficult to comply with (this is assuming the industry doesn’t simply argue that no amount of regulation will make importation “safe”).

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is also not a fan of large-scale importation from Canada (or anywhere else). He said last year that no “well-intentioned legislation” at the state level could create “a safe way to check the drugs coming in through these different importation schemes.”

This opposition is not surprising. U.S. consumers subsidize prescription drug costs for Canada and nearly all of Europe. Pharmaceutical companies look to the U.S. market, with its highly distorted payment systems, as a way to preserve their profit margins and pay for the cost of getting approval from the FDA and other medicines regulators. It’s much easier to block reforms to the U.S. system (and preserve U.S. profits) than it is to roll back nationalization in Canada and the European Union.

The FDA, meanwhile, is a deeply conservative agency when it comes to drug safety, and it generally opposes systems that it cannot supervise and control. While the AHS report suggests that regulatory compliance would be solely Vermont’s responsibility, I imagine the FDA would want to play a role as well (beyond certification) and that another layer of fees might be necessary to fund the FDA’s new oversight responsibilities. Such fees could further reduce the cost savings of importation. Again, this is mostly speculation, because there’s no precedent.

Even with what appears to be excellent model legislation and consultation from the National Academy for State Health Policy and the company FDAImports, I suspect that the odds here favor the status quo. Even if Vermont prevails, Section 804 certification for a population of 600,000 wouldn’t address the larger problems of a broken payer system and our obscenely generous drug patent laws.

Thanks to the state’s newly implemented public records rules, we’re starting to see the first stories detailing misconduct of California police officers. We’re also seeing the lengths to which police groups will go to keep those records secret.

In Burlingame, up in the Bay Area, media outlets were successful in getting records showing that a police officer, David Granucci, was fired last year after the Burlingame Police Department found out he had offered to help a woman deal with a DUI charge if she’d have sex with him. He appears to have made similar offers to two other women, one of whom apparently went through with it.

For decades, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for media outlets or the public to find out exactly what happened with Granucci because a state law in California, pushed through by police unions and signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown back in 1978, blocked the release of disciplinary records.

But the rules finally changed last year when Brown, who just concluded his fourth and final term as governor, approved changes that made public police investigation and disciplinary records. The law went into effect with the start of the new year.

Some folks are now doing whatever they can to stem the tide of releases. Two California cities, Inglewood and Long Beach, destroyed decades of police records, with both municipalities insisting that it was part of a plan to streamline record-keeping and had nothing to do with the new law. The police commander in Long Beach says they made sure to preserve records pertaining to current employees and only purged records of officers who no longer worked there. It’s not clear how that’s a good idea, given that officers who get fired for incompetence or misconduct frequently move on to other police departments in other cities, with the public often unaware of their troubled backgrounds.

Then there are the lawsuits. Police unions and their representatives are now trying to argue that the transparency law only applies to new records, produced after the start of 2019. There’s nothing in the bill itself that says this: It amends existing public records laws to add additional records that law enforcement agencies are required to release. The date of the bill’s implementation was the start of the year.

The California Supreme Court has declined to hear a suit from San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department employees, in which they argue that the law is not retroactive. But in Los Angeles, a superior court judge did grant an injunction that stops the Los Angeles Police Department from releasing records from prior to Jan. 1, until a hearing to determine whether the law covers records prior to 2019.

To be clear here, this new law does not order the public release of all police personnel records. It requires the release of records that pertain to incidents in which a law enforcement officer fires a weapon; an officer-involved incident that results in a person’s death or great bodily injury; an officer found to have engaged in sexual assault with a member of the public (this includes any sex act while on duty—relevant to the disclosure of the records about Granucci’s firing); and officers found to have engaged in dishonest conduct like concealing evidence, falsifying reports, and/or committing perjury.

These are all things the public deserves to know about state employees who have the power to kill them, take their belongings, and deprive them of their freedom. Nevertheless, police unions are fighting to stop law enforcement agencies from releasing this information, claiming that revealing records about their conduct somehow violates their rights.

On Thursday evening, members of the Tarrant County, Texas, Republican Party (TCRP) will vote on whether to give Vice Chair Shaid Shafi the boot. The problem some TCRP members have with Shafi: He’s Muslim.

Shafi entered the United States in 1990 and was naturalized in 2009. He is currently a member of the Southlake (Texas) City Council and makes a living as a trauma surgeon. He wrote in an open letter that he identifies as a Republican because he believes in “small government, lower taxes, individual responsibility, religious freedom, school choice, energy independence, rule of law, and secure borders.” Shafi also spoke to his own personal record as a council member, reminding others that he voted for lower property taxes in his area.

Due to his experience and commitment, TCRP Chairman Darl Easton appointed Shafi to serve as vice chair in July. However, members like precinct chair Dorrie O’Brien strongly support his ousting over concerns that he supports Islam, Islamic law, or “Islamic terror groups.” O’Brien, who has said that her faction has enough votes to prevail, claims that her concerns have nothing to do with Shafi’s religion.

Shafi addressed these concerns in his open letter, saying that he’s never been associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), or any terrorist organization. Furthermore, he specifically listed support for “American Laws for American Courts” as well as “Israel’s right to exist.”

Since the TCRP’s internal drama became public, prominent Republican figures and conservative outlets have disavowed the recall efforts.

“Discrimination against Dr. Shafi [because] he’s Muslim is wrong,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz. “The Constitution prohibits any religious test for public office [and] the First Amendment protects religious liberty for every faith. The Party of Lincoln should welcome everybody [and] celebrate Liberty.”

“Religious freedom is at the core of who we are as a nation and state and attacks on Dr. Shafi because of his faith are contrary to this guiding principle,” wrote Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, in a statement.

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush also became involved, tweeting, “I urge the Tarrant County GOP to stop this attempt to remove a hardworking county party official based on religious beliefs. We must move towards a more inclusive Republican Party and stop tearing down our own if we are to keep Texas red.”

Easton has also criticized the faction against Shafi, saying, “Most of them already have a prejudice against Muslims, and a lot of that comes from the attack on 9/11 and the Shariah law they claim all Muslims must obey.” Even though Shafi is an active member of his party, Easton observed, his efforts on behalf of the GOP have gone unrecognized by those seeking to remove him.

Despite the faction against Shafi and Thursday’s looming vote, elected Republican officials in the county signed a document in December saying they both support religious liberty and the chairman’s appointments. The TCRP shared the affirmation on their Facebook page.

In January 2014, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), then the GOP minority leader, gave a lengthy speech titled “Restoring the Senate.”

The point of the speech was to argue for the body’s relevance and importance, to make a case that the Senate was where America’s toughest legislative problems could and should be worked out, through vigorous debate, seriousness of purpose, and a shared sense of serving more than a single party’s short-term political priorities.

“Over the past several years, the Senate seems more like a campaign studio than a serious legislative body,” McConnell said. Centralization was a big part of the problem, he argued; debate should be embraced rather than avoided. He complained that “major legislation is now routinely drafted not in committee but in the Majority Leader’s conference room and then dropped on the floor with little or no opportunity for members to participate in the amendment process, virtually guaranteeing a fight.” McConnell warned that brute, simple-minded partisanship would produce legislation that was both worse and less politically stable, exacerbating the volatility of both politics and policy.

Meanwhile, the Senate had become subordinate to the political priorities of the White House. That needed to change. “The Senate should be setting national priorities, not simply waiting on the White House to do it for us.” The ongoing failure to buck the executive branch and minimize shallow political gamesmanship, he said, “diminishes the Senate.”

Five years later, McConnell is the Senate majority leader under a GOP president, and he is running the Senate in almost exactly the manner he previously decried.

To take the most prominent recent example: One of the most notable features of the current shutdown fight is that McConnell has almost entirely absented the Senate from the negotiating process. It is a galling and hypocritical abdication of congressional responsibility. Instead of restoring the Senate, he’s broken it further.

McConnell has put the responsibility to negotiate a resolution entirely on President Donald Trump and House Democrats, repeatedly saying that he will only bring a vote to the floor if Trump is guaranteed to sign it. Multiple Republican senators are reportedly concerned with Trump’s demand for border barrier funding, and with the increasing likelihood that the president will circumvent Congression by declaring a national emergency, but McConnell is suborning their interests to the president’s political demands.

Trump’s demand for a border wall is the definition of pointless political stunt; even immigration restrictionists view the barrier as a largely symbolic goal. When talking to network news anchors earlier this week, Trump himself reportedly dismissed his trip to the border today as a pointless political stunt foisted upon him by advisers.

In the 2014 speech, McConnell cast the Senate as the platform for solving the nation’s most significant disputes. “The place where it happens, the place where all the national conflicts and controversies that arise in this big, diverse, wonderful country have always been resolved, is right here in this chamber,” he said. Yet McConnell now refuses to take any affirmative action to come to an agreement. He is forcing the Senate to serve as an empty pass-through for the president’s partisan, political agenda. Whatever you think of the shutdown, the Senate shouldn’t be sitting out the debate, taking no position and expecting everyone else to do the work.

The shutdown, of course, is not the first time McConnell has conducted Senate affairs in exactly the manner he formerly criticized. In 2017, the GOP’s two biggest legislative efforts—the failed Obamacare repeal bill and the tax overhaul—were both strictly controlled by leadership, through an insular, secretive, centralized process that largely avoided the sort of extended debate that McConnell said was necessary to produce better legislation and shore up the Senate’s reputation.

Indeed, under Trump, McConnell has run the Senate in almost exactly the manner he warned would corrode not only the upper chamber’s stature but the entire legislative process.

Perhaps McConnell didn’t really believe what he said back in 2014 and was just jockeying for power from his position in the minority. He has always been fairly comfortable with hypocrisy if it affords him a partisan advantage. But that’s less of an excuse and more of a way of capturing the essential problem.

In any case, the essential dynamic that McConnell described five years ago has turned out to be basically right, at least when it comes to the spillover effects: Treating the Senate almost exclusively as essentially subservient to the executive branch, and as a platform for partisan posturing and political point scoring rather than a serious forum for legislative debate, as McConnell has, has contributed to declining trust in our governing institutions, to the poisoning of American political discourse, to the instability and fragility of public policy. He has diminished not just the Senate but American political life.

This week, as one of their first legislative initiatives after taking control of the House, Democrats unveiled the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which would require that almost all firearm transfers involve federally licensed dealers. The aim is to make sure that all gun buyers undergo background checks to verify that they are legally allowed to own firearms.

This policy is very popular, favored by 84 percent to 94 percent of respondents in recent national polls. It’s not hard to see why: Assuming that Congress has selected fair and logical criteria for owning guns, shouldn’t those rules be enforced to the fullest extent possible? Why make an exception for private transfers, thereby giving potentially dangerous people a way to complete purchases that would otherwise be blocked?

On the face of it, there is no downside to broadening the background check requirement, and it might stop would-be mass shooters and other violent criminals from arming themselves. Advocates portray a system of “universal background checks” as the epitome of “commonsense, bipartisan gun violence prevention legislation,” the sort of policy that unites reasonable people across the political spectrum. It seems you’d have to be a crazy extremist to oppose the idea. Yet if you dig into the details, you will find sound reasons to be skeptical. I can think of at least four:

1. “Universal background checks” are not really universal. I am not talking about the exceptions for police, military personnel, and transfers between close relatives. I am talking about the impossibility of enforcing a requirement that all gun sales go through federally licensed dealers. Last year researchers who looked at what happened after Colorado, Delaware, and Washington imposed that requirement reported that “background check rates increased in Delaware, by 22%–34% depending on the type of firearm,” but “no overall changes were observed in Washington and Colorado.” It’s easy to understand why the average gun owner might balk at the hassle and expense of bringing his firearm to a licensed dealer so he can legally dispose of his own property. People who knowingly sell guns to criminals are even less motivated to comply. The government may want to record all heretofore private transfers, but there is no practical way of accomplishing that goal.

2. The criteria for owning guns are not fair or logical. Federal law prohibits gun sales to millions of Americans who pose no threat to others, including anyone who uses illegal drugs, anyone who was ever subjected to involuntary psychiatric treatment, and anyone with a felony record, whether or not the offense involved violence or even a victim. Assuming that a broader background check requirement actually results in more background checks, more people will unjustly lose their Second Amendment rights because a database shows they were convicted of marijuana possession or treated for suicidal impulses. While most “unlawful users” of controlled substances probably can avoid detection, they will have to lie on the federal firearm purchase form, which is itself a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. And as the form explicitly says, unlawful users of controlled substances include people who use marijuana for medical or recreational purposes even when it’s allowed by state law.

3. Background checks won’t stop mass shootings. While 70 percent of respondents in a 2018 Gallup poll thought “requiring background checks for all gun sales” would be “very effective” in “preventing mass shootings,” the perpetrators of these crimes typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records. Those who are not legally allowed to own guns can still get them from others who are, as the perpetrators of the Columbine and Sandy Hook massacres did.

4. Background checks won’t stop ordinary criminals from getting guns. Violent criminals are already breaking the law by using guns to commit crimes and even by owning the guns if they have felony records. What are the chances that they or the people who sell them guns will suddenly decide to obey the law when it requires background checks for all transfers?

The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, in short, would criminalize actions that violate no one’s rights, impose burdens on innocent gun owners, and deprive harmless people of the right to armed self-defense without doing much of anything to improve public safety. No wonder it’s a top priority for Democrats.

Rep. Steve King, the nativist Republican congressman from Iowa who has likened illegal immigrants to “livestock,” is just asking questions. In a New York Times interview, he says:

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

In the recent past (2017) King insisted that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” and only a few years before that (2013) he insisted that “there isn’t anyone that can fairly characterize me as anti-immigrant.” Which pretty much tells you what kind of bubble the guy is living in: He’s openly hostile to immigration, both legal and illegal, but refuses to admit as much.

Still, even if the Vietnam draft-dodger can’t be swayed, it’s worth at least pointing out to those who might be open to discussion that equating America with whiteness is fundamentally un-American. The United States has a deeply troubled history with race and racism, but one of the few things that makes our country different is that we aspire to be a nation that aspires (and often achieves) a sense of identity that goes far beyond blood and soil. Take it away, Jean de Crevecouer in Letters from an American Farmer (1782):

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.

He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.

I’ve noted elsewhere that Crevecoeur has his limits (among other things, he speaks only of men and he owned slaves for a time). But he accurately captures a process by which America is a country that has long aspired to be a place where people could be judged, in Martin Luther King’s phrase, by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

It’s disturbing that members of the federal government, such as Steve King, persist in identitarian politics. Yet in a country that is more genuinely diverse and less racist than ever, his sort of thinking signals nothing more than the death rattle of the racial collectivism that has always stained American history.

Before he became president, Donald Trump promised to build an “impenetrable” barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border. “On Day One, we will begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall,” he said in August 2016.

But if that barrier gets built, it looks like it’ll be pretty, well, penetrable.

At first, Trump wanted a concrete wall. Now putting aside for a moment the many arguments against constructing a wall, concrete would tough to breach—though not impossible. A February 2018 Customs and Border Protection report, which KPBS obtained in September, stated that all eight of the steel and concrete border wall types ordered by the president were vulnerable to breaching, though many of the specific breaching techniques were redacted.

In any case, Trump has recently shifted to calling for a steel-slatted barrier. That way, border agents on the U.S. side can see what’s happening on the Mexican side. But it also means people with the right sawing equipment can cut through the wall. At least, that’s what a photo of a breached steel slat prototype obtained by NBC News shows:

Dept. of Homeland Security testing of a steel slat prototype for border wall proved it could be cut through with a saw, according to a report by DHS.

A photo obtained by @NBCNews shows the results of the test. https://t.co/SNxn6YneG9 pic.twitter.com/UP9EgHGxDx

— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 10, 2019

NBC says the photo was taken after Marine Corps experts at “Pogo Row” (a testing location near the California-Mexico border) “were instructed to attempt to destroy the barriers with common tools.”

San Diego Sector Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott tells NBC that the prototypes tested at Pogo Row were not as big as the ones toured by Trump when he visited the border in March. But that shouldn’t matter much: If they’re made of the same material, they should be vulnerable to the same breaching technique, no matter how big.