Gov. Rick Perry: Fine, if you won't do it, the Texas National Guard will secure the border

---

If Barack Obama won't do his job - and clearly he won't - Rick Perry will. According to the Washington Post, Perry has ordered the Texas National Guard to be dispatched to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. There's going to be an announcement this afternoon at 3 p.m. Eastern:

Perry will announce his plans Monday to mobilize some 1,000 guardsmen to the Rio Grande Valley to increase security at the border, according to the Monitor, a south Texas newspaper. The newspaper quoted a state senator and an internal memo it obtained from a state official’s office. Perry spokesman Felix Browne told The Washington Post he would neither confirm nor deny the report, but said all details will be given at a news conference at 2 p.m. Central time Monday in Austin. It was unclear what mission the guard will have. The news comes amid the continued surge of young immigrants, most of them from Central America, crossing the border and scattered protests in a few U.S. cities from those who don’t want them housed in their midst. Perry, a potential 2016 Republican presidential contender, spoke in Iowa and elsewhere in recent days, promising to take matters into his own hands if President Obama does not act.

And it's not as if Perry hasn't been pleading with Obama to do it. He has. And Obama simply refuses to do so. This is not unprecedented by the way. In 2010, then-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson dispatched the New Mexico National Guard to secure the border following the murder of a rancher there. It's not as if governors don't have the authority to use their own national guard troops at their discretion to protect the security of their states. It's just that it's a rare situation in which a governor feels he has no choice because the president of the United States simply refuses to do his job. One note about the politics of this: Perry's 2012 presidential campaign was essentially declared dead by pundits and pollsters after a debate in which he had a mental block and forgot one of three cabinet-level departments he believed should be eliminated. It was a momentary lapse and really no reflection whatsoever on his ability to govern, but because it could be portrayed as a high-profile "deer in the headlights" moment, it was said Perry could not recover from it. Barack Obama, by contrast, has essentially stopped doing his job altogether. But because that cannot be classified as some sort of "gaffe," apparently he's still taken seriously as a man with presidential timber. So: Why do we even need a federal government if it's going to be left to the states to ensure their own security anyway? Texas might as well go back to being an independent republic. It would be rich with natural resources and would boast one of the strongest economies in the western world. And the left's dream of a Red-Texas-Turning-Blue would be squashed in an instant given Texas's resolved to secure its own borders. And if Rick Perry doesn't want to be the president of the Republic of Texas, I can think of someone who would do a great job. Or . . . these three guys!