Volunteers, anyone? That's the report from Jerry Seper and Stephen Dinan this morning in the Washington Times.

The U.S. Border Patrol is asking for volunteers among its agents to help build fences on the U.S.-Mexico border, even as President Bush is withdrawing half the National Guard troops he sent there last year to build fences.

A memo circulated last week to Border Patrol sector chiefs said fence-building efforts on the Southwest border were going to fall short of Mr. Bush's goal of finishing 70 miles in fiscal 2007, which ends Sept. 30, "so the Border Patrol is now going back into the fence-building business."

This is precisely why the blowback at the Senate's comprehensive bill a couple of months ago was as high as it was. People simply don't trust the government to keep its word, especially when it comes to enforcing immigration. 700 miles of fencing was passed by Congress and signed by the President at the end of last year. Seven months later, the Kennedy-McCain compromise immigration bill failed largely because it did not have enough border security first enforcement, and it had too many loopholes in national security when it came to granting probationary visas to people coming here from countries of special interest to the State Department.

Once the bill was killed off, the Republicans, especially in the Senate, were left with how to reconnect with their estranged base that felt as if the Senate was trying to ram the legislation through. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, the chief negotiator for the Republican side when it came to crafting the Ted Kennedy lead balloon of a bill, took an enormous amount of heat from the conservative base by promising that the proposed comprehensive bill would guarantee that 371 miles of fencing would be completed during the first 18 months after signing the bill, on the way to the full 700 miles. In fact, Senator Kyl also claimed that the fencing was currently being constructed, and would continue on that same pace to 371 miles regardless of whether the bill passed or not, as was repeated by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.

Now that the bill has no chance of passing, it seems that there's not quite as much of a push to get the fence done at the clip being touted during the debate earlier this summer.

It is up to the Bush administration to get this fence built. The authorization for it was signed by the President last year. There was an amendment for $3 billion dollars as part of the Homeland Security appropriations bill just attached specifically to fund the construction of border fencing and increased Border Patrol agents.

If this story is true, then the Republicans in the Senate, including Senators Kyl, Graham, Cornyn, McConnell, DeMint and Sessions, should at once publicly hold the administration accountable for why the Homeland Security Department is now looking for volunteers to work on the fence, and why the 371 miles by the end of next year isn't even close to realistic if they can't get 70 miles done by the end of September, and why they can't seem to find a good contractor.

Senator Kyl along with several co-sponsors just dropped a new border security first bill on the Senate floor right before the August recess. It's an appropriate step politically to try and differentiate between the parties about which one takes national security at the border seriously. Immigration and border security are going to be one of several issues next year, But the administration seems to be playing games with the construction of the fence, negating any political gains that might be made by offering this legislation.

If I were Senator Kyl, having taking the slings and arrows to try and give the President the immigration bill he wanted this summer, and I opened up the Washington Times this morning to read that they're now looking for volunteers that might know how to build fences, I wouldn't be too happy.