Democratic leaders are negotiating in bad faith, against good policy, and to lamentable results in the current border-wall-funding theater on Capitol Hill.

Set aside for now the realities that President Trump has played his pro-wall poker hand incredibly ineptly, that conservatives in general have badly overstated the relative importance of immigration-related policy, and that the Trumpian Right has cultishly turned “The Wall” into an item of absurdly talismanic significance. Those contentions can be handled in another column.