Wednesday, December 26, 2018

There is a way!


Via JJ Sefton
Rovvy Lepor writes in American Thinker,
It seemed like the long-awaited border wall funding had finally slipped into the political abyss. Then, under withering criticism from conservatives and other supporters of the border wall, President Trump reversed course, making it clear that the remaining portions of the budget will only be signed once he receives funding for the wall. On December 20, Republicans in the House of Representatives responded by passing substantial border wall funding in the form of a bill allocating $5.7 billion for the wall and close to $8 billion in disaster relief for areas hit hard by this year’s hurricanes and wildfires.

While the $5.7 billion falls short of the $21.6 billion that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated it would take to complete the border wall, it is a substantial step in the right direction. DHS estimated that the $21.6 billion would fund a border wall that would extend almost the entire length of the border and would add about 1,250 miles to the border wall, which stood at 654 miles (at the time of the DHS report). $5.7 billion would fund over one-quarter of the border wall and allows President Trump to construct approximately 330 miles of additional border wall in the most vulnerable and dangerous parts of the border.

This leaves budget reconciliation as the only option to pass the $5.7 billion in border wall funding. Budget reconciliation, like the nuclear option, allows for a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate to pass legislation, rather than the normally required 60 votes. However, unlike the nuclear option, it would not break precedent and would likely enable the border funding bill to pass. In May 2018, the Heritage Foundation recommended that Republicans pass the 2019 budget using budget reconciliation. This would have resulted in a superior budget to the current budget and would have included substantial border wall funding because it would not have required support from the Democrats.

...It is even more likely that Republicans will pass $5.7 billion with reconciliation than if the bill would have funded $25 billion because all but one of the Republican senators are needed to vote in favor of this bill. While detractors of the bill in the Democrat party decry spending billions of dollars protecting the southern border, funding the border wall is a very small amount of money compared to the estimated 2019 budget of $4.448 trillion. $5.7 billion is only 0.128% or 1/780 as compared to the budget. And spending so little on the border wall to protect U.S. national security and fulfill a basic campaign promise is the least that can be done.

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