Isakson, not suprisingly, injects common sense into border-shutdown issue

Both of Georgia’s United States senators were in their home state this week. While Sen. David Perdue was here in Columbus as the keynoter for the 12th annual Jim Blanchard Leadership Forum, his colleague, Sen. Johnny Isakson, was in the metro Atlanta area.

Both men, each in his own way, talked about leadership, but from different perspectives and in different contexts. Staff writer Tony Adams has reported on Perdue’s remarks. Some of Isakson’s appeared in the Marietta Daily Journal after the state’s senior U.S. senator addressed the Marietta Business Association’s monthly luncheon.

One issue about which Isakson and Perdue have both expressed concern is the urgency of getting business done with the clock ticking on the session. Congress goes back to work Sept. 5, and Isakson, now in his 19th year in the Senate, told his Cobb County audience that he had never seen a Congress with “more to do and less time to do it than we have right now.”

The Senate has not passed any appropriations bills, he said: “That’s not the way to run a government … It’s time we did what you did in your house — sit around that kitchen table in Washington, decide where we’re going to prioritize our money … if we don’t, we’re going to be in desperate, (dire) straits.”

There’s nothing there with which anybody could reasonably disagree. But some of Isakson’s remarks to the newspaper after the event were perhaps of even more significance. Certainly they were of significant interest.

Asked about President Donald Trump’s threat of a possible government shutdown if Congress doesn’t appropriate funds for the Mexican border wall (the one candidate Trump promised voters Mexico was going to pay for), the senator was unequivocal and unambiguous.

“Shutting down the government never does anything,” Isakson told the Daily Journal. “It doesn’t save you any money, you can’t get anything done, people on Social Security don’t get their checks, you put off solving the problem and make it more expensive in the future. It’s the easiest threat in the world to make, but it’s one that if you ever deliver on it, which Newt Gingrich did back in 1996, you have a disaster like we had in 1996, so it’s not going to happen.”

Isakson has never been vague about his commitment to border security; it is an issue he has put at or near the top of his national security agenda in many a conversation with this editorial board over the years.

But a border wall is, and always has been, a wrongheaded idea with an absurdly high price tag — a simplistically tangible symbol for a complex reality. Shutting down the government in a political standoff to force funding for it would just make it more expensive, and not worth a penny more.

Securing the border requires thoughtful policy and thoughtful budgeting, not walls and shutdowns. That’s common sense, which Isakson is clearly injecting into the debate.

This story was originally published August 29, 2017 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Isakson, not suprisingly, injects common sense into border-shutdown issue."