Wall idea already tried

The current emotionally charged but fiscally absurd talk about building a border wall to keep unwanted people from entering the country is not new. Founding Father John Jay, a staunch Protestant and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed erecting “a wall of brass around the country” to keep out the Catholics. Presently, there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court.

The Chinese once spent an unimaginable fortune building the greatest wall in the history of mankind to keep out the foreigners. It didn’t work. All they got was a ridiculously expensive tourist attraction and a colossal monument to the stupidity of government.

Unfortunately, our current president and the Republican Party are more than willing to repeat an enormous, prohibitively expensive and unworkable historic blunder.

This story was originally published October 20, 2017 at 1:12 PM with the headline "Wall idea already tried."