Our Douglas Andrews aptly took apart the Senate’s “border security” bill yesterday. The Wall Street Journal editorial board says it’s a “bill worth passing,” but most other conservative thinkers say it’s a disaster. “‘No’ to the Border Deal,” say the editors of National Review. The New York Post editorial board says it “wasn’t remotely worth the wait.” You get the idea.

Political analyst David Harsanyi likewise thinks it’s ridiculous and a sham.

Can you imagine Senate Democrats ever supporting a bill that gave President Donald Trump the power to temporarily ignore provisions he didn’t believe were in the “national interest”? Of course not. Yet one of the most conspicuous parts of the new bipartisan border bill allows Joe Biden to do just that.

Once there is a rolling average of 5,000 border encounters per day for a week, or 8,500 encounters in a single day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be given “emergency authority” and compelled to turn away anyone else who crosses (though there are many exemptions). Most conservatives believe this threshold is already too high. Under 5,000 daily crossings can still amount to nearly 2 million entries per year, which is around double the number of Green Cards we hand out annually.

Yet, on top of that, Biden has the power to unilaterally suspend the closure (for 45 days each year) if he deems it “in the national interest.”

Figuring out the “national interest,” Harsanyi notes, is “the reason we have political debates in the first place.” Not so we can turn over those decisions to one man, and a dementia-addled one at that.

I believe it’s in the national interest for the executive branch’s power to be limited to its constitutional role and mind its own business.

As for the rest of the bill, he adds:

Most of the provisions in the bill are so loophole-riddled they are worse than irrelevant. One provision allows administration officers to grant asylum without any oversight from judges, who (at least, theoretically) use a set of criteria to adjudicate these cases. “Asylum” might have been stripped of any real meaning, as well, but it’s a mystery why James Lankford wants to hand Alejandro Mayorkas more autonomy on this front. Or any front. (Again, can you imagine Democrats signing onto a bill that handed Chad Wolf more discretion over asylum cases?)

“Democrats are acting as if they’ve made some giant, historic concession even deigning to address the crisis,” Harsanyi says, but there’s no real compromise here. Instead, “they’ve rigged the bill.” He concludes:

And lest anyone think I’m some kind of hardline closed-border type, I’m fine with more asylum-seekers and more immigration and more work visas. High walls and wide gates, etc. Like many Americans, though, I’m just not a fan of policies that perpetuate anarchy.

Read the whole thing here.