Federal Judiciary

Checkpoint to Nowhere -- By: Travis Kavulla

Over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner laid out the conditions of his famous Frontier Thesis. The land in the American West could be considered ?settled,? and therefore no longer ?the frontier,? Professor Turner postulated, when it had at least two people per square mile.

By that reckoning, Montana?s Daniels County, on the border with a similarly bleak portion of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, is as yet unclosed frontier. Or, rather, it was once closed -- in 1909, when homesteaders, a disproportionate number of them Norwegian, flooded the area, full of optimism over the land giveaway. But they soon found that Daniels County (and for that matter much of eastern Montana) did not live up even to Scandinavian standards of agriculture. Scorching in the summer, bone-chilling in the winter, always with ripping winds, and suffering a dearth of topsoil and water, Daniels County is no one?s idea of paradise.

Nearly as soon as the droves of farmers arrived, they started leaving. Daniels County has about one-fourth of the population it had at its height. About the size of Rhode Island, it has 1,427 square miles and about 2,017 souls -- even fewer today, probably, since that is the figure from the 2000 census.

This sleepy place needed a ?stimulus package? long before the clever term was devised, about nine decades and counting. Finally, it may have come. Last week, the Obama administration announced a $15-million earmark for upgrades to the smaller of two border checkpoints in Daniels County, located in the tiny village of Whitetail. Fifteen million is chump change in the context of the federal budget, but it?s big money in these parts, representing over $200,000 apiece for each of Whitetail?s 71 residents.

Arguably, the existing border checkpoint at Whitetail, which sees three people a day on average, is doing an adequate job already. As a Montanan whose college girlfriend hailed from Saskatoon, I have some experience crossing the northern border into Canada. The land is desolate, the border guards scrutinizing but affable. Two years ago, in a slightly more populous county than Daniels, I drove over a fine paved road from the small farming town of Harlem to the border crossing at Turner, 41 miles north. I did not encounter a single other car on the way. At the border station, the guard was testy when I did not stop exactly at the stop line. I promised I would next time. After joking about whether I had any radioactive materials in the trunk -- I did not -- he told me I was the first person to cross all day (this was at 2 p.m.), except for the few locals, two of whom were brothers, who did so every day. And this was a border crossing that is two or three times as busy as Whitetail.

The money for the Whitetail checkpoint is coming from the Homeland Security portion of the stimulus package, which includes $720 million to upgrade international border checkpoints. Tiny Whitetail had little reason to beat out major crossings like Laredo, Tex., for a chunk of this money. Nonetheless, it and other remote checkpoints did, thanks to Janet Napolitano?s willingness to sign off on a plan that overturns her own department?s list of priorities and reduces border-security appropriations to just another honeypot for pork-barreling senators.

They would be, in this case, Montana?s two Democratic senators, Max Baucus and Jon Tester, who are sitting pretty these days. Baucus, senior and powerful, is the chairman of the Finance Committee and gets to say ?yes? or ?no? or ?I think I?ll write my own bill? to pretty much anyone who wants to spend a lot of money, whether on health care, climate change, Social Security -- really any major domestic item. Tester, meanwhile, is a first-termer whose seat Democrats badly want to protect. He voted against the stimulus package, allowing himself to play the populist outraged over what goes on in ?Warshington,? as he calls it, but during the August recess he nonetheless has been roaming the state to boast of the bacon he has scored: here a hospital wing, there a checkpoint, it all builds up to re-election in 2012. Max -- magnanimous, and looking to keep his grip on Montana?s Democrats -- even lets Jon take credit for things the senior senator finagled.

And so, in the name of economic development in Montana, Tester has gone boldly forth and defended things like the Whitetail border crossing. ?The northern border tends to be forgotten, and it shouldn?t be,? he told a reporter from Great Falls, responding to complaints over the huge mismatch between Whitetail?s importance and the sum of money it?s getting.

The senator neglected to mention, of course, that there is another border crossing just 30 miles away (north of Scobey, the Daniels County seat), and that nearly all Montana checkpoints have received upgrades since 9/11. He has a point about Whitetail?s being a forgotten place, but is this something the U.S. Senate should really try to do something about?

Not to be too dramatic, but Mother Nature herself seems to have condemned this corner of the world to unlivability. Human beings -- resourceful creatures that they are -- have voted with their feet and moved away. Whitetail?s decline outdoes even the Daniels County average. At the outset of the First World War, the town?s population was seven times what it is today. It?s a place whose Wikipedia entry has one source: Ghost Towns of the Montana Prairie.

What nature and agronomy have ordained, there have been other earnest efforts to reverse. As long as the premises of Keynesian economics and pump-priming have been around, there have been stimulus packages, though by other names.

In the 1930s and ?40s, FDR?s back-to-work programs mobilized huge numbers of men. Their achievements are, even today, nothing short of amazing. In eastern Montana, the construction of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River provided 11,000 jobs -- employing an astounding 4 percent of the state?s male population at the time. One of the largest earth-filled dams in the world, it took five years to build and created the largest man-made lake in the world (136 miles long), a place now prized by birders and boaters alike. Electricity and irrigation were the concrete gains from the project -- though even this stimulus couldn?t keep people living in the area.

Such a stimulus project, which employed large numbers of men for a long period and added capital value to a significant amount of land, would never be possible now. Environmentalists would tie it up in federal court -- ?Think of the pallid sturgeon!? they would cry -- and unionization would bloat construction costs beyond the possible.

That?s the truly pathetic aspect of this era?s stimulus. Obama and Congress are clearly willing to spend almost any amount of the people?s money. But the projects to which appropriations are given are lacking in ambition and public usefulness.

While FDR?s programs had enough waste to go around, they still resulted in projects that have lasted to this day. If you have ever hiked a trail or driven a scenic road in a national park or forest, you likely were enjoying the fruits of the Civilian Conservation Corps?s labors. Even some of the flakier projects were redeeming. We know a lot more than we otherwise would about life under slavery because of the Federal Writers? Project?s efforts to record the narratives of the last generation of American ex-slaves before their death.

Today?s stimulus projects are hollow. To reconstruct already passable roads, to throw money at border crossings where no one wants to cross, to prop up existing debt -- none of these are lasting accomplishments. The economic benefit of politically influenced boondoggles like the Whitetail border crossing is co-extensive -- and co-exhaustive -- with the federal dollars thrown into it. The value they add ends when the federal government finishes construction. A checkpoint is not going to prop up a forgotten place like Whitetail. It, too, will be forgotten.

-- Travis Kavulla, a former associate editor of National Review, is on a writing holiday in Montana after a year of reporting from East Africa.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on September 02, 2009 (boomark / email).