Rep. Steve King (R-IA) went on the House floor on Tuesday to discuss a fence that he “designed” for the southern boarder. (King constructed a model of the fence as he was speaking.) King’s design features a wire electrified “with the kind of current that would not kill somebody.” King noted that “we do this with livestock all the time.” Watch it:
Transcript:
KING: So when I get down there and sit on that border, what I do is I come to this conclusion, we can’t shut that off unless we build a fence and a wall. I want to put the fence in, but I want to put a wall in, and I designed one. And this just simply is the desert floor — put a trench in that desert floor. We have the ability to put together a machine that would be a slip form machine that would lay a footing about like this, Mr. Speaker.
And if I give you a look at the end of that, that’s so you’d have that about five feet deep underneath the ground. It’d keep the wall from tipping over. We’d pour a notch in it that’ll allow us to put pre-cast panels in. And it would sit, it would look like this, and this would be flush with the desert floor. And then you’d bring in pre-cast concrete walls — ten fee wide, thirteen and a half feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a twelve foot finished wall, just like that, Mr. Speaker. Drop these panels in together, in this fashion. Just take a crane and drop them in. Our little construction company could build a mile a day of this pretty easily, once you’ve got your system going. The whole two thousand miles are not going to work that way, but a lot of it will work this way, Mr. Speaker.
And so to just wrap up this construction, this’d be an example, then, of how that wall would look. Now you could also deconstruct it the same way. You could take it back down. If somehow they got their economy working and got their laws working in Mexico we could pull this back out just as easy as we could put it in. We could open it up again or we could open it up and let livestock run through there, whatever we choose.
I also say 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. We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.