Nancy Pelosi's attempt to shut down President Trump's border wall project failed. She tried to use a Resolution of Disapproval to end the President's emergency declaration. Even though a dozen Senate Republicans voted to rebuke the President, that fell far short of the number necessary to override Trump's veto.
Pelosi will still hold a vote this coming week to override the veto, but it is highly unlikely that she will get the 40+ Republicans that she would need to flip. There just isn't any upside for them.
Make no mistake, there are four dozen Republicans who want to vote to block the border wall. They just know it is political suicide to do it, especially if there aren't even enough votes in the Senate to succeed.
Pelosi will hold her vote, it will fail, and then the Left will pretend that the fight is over.
But it isn't over. It is just beginning.
Right now, both parties are meeting behind closed doors to hash out the spending bills due in September for the next fiscal year. That may seem like a long way away, but the behind the scenes work is happening right now. You see, since Congress goes on vacation for much of the summer, the negotiations have to happen now in order for them to have a budget to vote on when they get back.
And just like the last time there was negotiations over the border wall, Republicans aren't even putting up a fight...
President Trump signed his national emergency order so he could reprogram just 3.5 billion in MILCON (military construction) funding. By declaring the open border to be a national security issue, this allows the President to use this military construction funding to build the wall.
But the Pentagon just released an amazing report this week. After digging through their books, they found a whopping 10+ billion that Trump can re-program for the border wall. Most of it comes from military construction projects in Hawaii and California that had already been delayed and probably wouldn't be finished this year anyway.
Congressional Republicans literally gasped when they learned this. The White House also revealed that they are redesigning the border wall to cut costs and putting the project out to bid, allowing them to build many more miles of barriers than originally thought. So, instead of building just 250 miles of new border barriers, this newly discovered funding and cost-cutting would allow President Trump to, at least theoretically, build a wall along the entire US-Mexico border.
Pelosi's veto-override vote this coming week is just political theater. The real fight is in the appropriations committees and subcommittees.
Here are the of the things that Democrats and Republicans are negotiating over right now.
1) Clawing-back the funding so that any funds Trump doesn't fully spend before the end of September get moved away from the Pentagon. This is a big one. It would be very hard for President Trump to spend all 10 billion in just the next six months. Even if they get the projects approved, not all of the funding would be spent in time. If the Republicans cave and let the Democrats push this provision through, the border wall will not get built.
2) Passing a provision amending the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to block President Trump from finishing the border wall projects or ever trying to reprogram funding for the wall again. If it goes through, construction would immediately grind to a halt and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.
3) Forcing the President to remove fencing and wall segments that have already been erected. This one to me is just madness. The Left wants open borders so badly that the most radical among them want to take down any border wall sections that Donald Trump manages to put up using this reprogrammed funding.
I get it, there's nothing 'sexy' about an appropriations battle going on behind closed doors. What is happening right now in Congress won't be in the news for months. And when the media finally does start covering the appropriations process, the bill will already be written and it will be too late to change any of it.
If you want to stop these spineless RINOs from teaming up with the Democrats to block the wall, it needs to be right now!
You already know that 12 Senate Republicans had the gall last week to vote to block President Trump's border emergency order. The turncoats were: Sens. Blunt (MO), Collins (ME), Lee (UT), Romney (UT), Murkowski (AK), Portman (OH), Rubio (FL), Toomey (PA), Paul (KY), Wicker (MS), Alexander (TN), and Moran (KS)
The Republican Senators I just put in bold currently sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee. It only takes one of them to flip in order to finalize a bill to pull the plug on Trump's border wall funding.
And they're already negotiating with Democrats to pull the border wall funding forever...
We have never been so close to securing the Southern Border. We finally have a President willing to do everything in his power to keep this country safe and, like clockwork, Republicans are lining up to block him.
You CANNOT let this happen!
No surrender,
Joe Otto
Conservative Daily
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