In south Texas, in the places where D.C. bureaucrats never go, the ordinary people are acutely sensitive to the issues at stake. Mere weeks back my colleagues met with ranchers in Starr County, Texas — remote, rural, and hard up on the Rio Grande — and one of those ranchers, a man who has encountered armed traffickers from Mexico on his own property more than once, asked about exactly this. He was a U.S. Army veteran who defended his country at war, he said, so why won’t the United States defend him?

He’s asking the right question. Washington, D.C., is giving the wrong answer. The good question and its bad answer illuminate what’s really at stake in the buoy-barrier case, which is — as is so often true — about things far beyond itself. Every American citizen in every American community has a legitimate expectation that his government will not attack his way of life, and will not side with foreign powers against him.

The Biden regime does both. In understanding what it means, we hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s distress from two centuries back: “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” But the Union is not done yet. The question is whether the regime in D.C. will succeed in rendering it a tool for our repression — or Texas will succeed in returning it to its founding purpose.

The question is open. All we can say for sure is that if the Biden regime fights for Mexico, it is Texas, now, that fights for America.