U.S. Rep. Steve King this week went to the House floor to display the model of a wall the Kiron Republican said he personally designed for the U.S. border with Mexico.
King said the same tactic employed to manage livestock could be used with his border plan - and he made two livestock references in talking about the wall.
"We need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top or put a ladder there." King said in displaying his design. "We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time."
In his remarks, King said he has visited the border and assisted the Minutemen with building portions of a fence on the border.
"I had the privilege to go down to the border of Arizona and Mexico and help build some fence to get some of that project started," King said. "And I happen to have a list of 25 members of Congress that would be happy to help put some fence up to be able to control this border."
Added King, "When I go down there and sit on that border, what I do is I have come to this conclusion: we cannot shut that off unless we build a fence and a wall," King said on the House floor. "I want to put the fence in, but I want to put a wall in. I designed one."
The Hill newspaper, which followed King's wall and fence demonstration on C-SPAN, noted that the Kiron Republican had mock sand representing the desert and fake construction panels.
"We have the ability to put together a machine that would be a slip-form machine that would lay a footing … so you would have that about 5-foot deep underneath the ground," King said. "That would keep the wall from tipping over. We would pour a notch in it that allows us to put pre-cast panels in. It would look like this, only this would be flush with the desert floor. And then you would bring in precast concrete panels, 10 feet wide, 131/2 feet tall. They would construct it to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that."
King said this process would work for most of the 2,000-mile wall he proposes. The wall wouldn't necessarily be permanent, King said.
"If somehow they got their economy working, and got their laws working in Mexico, we can pull this back out just as easy as we can put it in," King said. "We can open it up again, and we can open it up and let livestock run through there or whatever we choose."
King estimated the United States could build the wall for about $1.3 million a mile. He said the wall wouldn't necessarily need to be the same on all parts of the border.
King's office had not returned a call to the Daily Times Herald as of presstime late this morning to answer questions about the livestock analogies and whether King has the civil engineering and law-enforcement credentials needed to design a multi-billion-dollar national fence.
The congressman's spokesperson, Summer Johnson, did tell The Hill newspaper and The Des Moines Register that King's two references to livestock with the fence were a comparison of fences - not immigrants and livestock.
"He was comparing a fence to a fence - a border fence to an Iowa farm fence," Johnson told The Hill.
