Posted on 03/24/2018 3:26:05 PM PDT by zencycler
President Donald Trump briefly threatened to veto a giant spending bill on Friday and then reluctantly signed it to keep the military funded.
The lack of funding for a border wall with Mexico is likely one of the president’s biggest frustrations. Trump mentioned the wall when he threatened to veto the bill. The $1.3 trillion budget includes just $1.6 billion for wall construction along the southern border, far short of the $25 billion needed to accomplish Trump’s signature campaign promise.
To make matters worse, the spending bill specifically prohibits Trump from building the kind of wall he wants. The president nevertheless celebrated the progress and pointed out that construction can begin immediately.
But Trump also dropped an eyebrow-raising hint that he could take an unprecedented option and build the wall using the enormous military budget.
“I want to address the situation on border security, which I call national defense,” Trump said. “I call it stopping drugs from pouring across our border. And I call it illegal immigration. It’s all of those things. But national defense is a very important two words. Because by having a strong border system, including a wall, we are in a position, militarily, that is very advantageous.”
For the first time, Trump underlined the significance of the barrier as a military structure and a matter of national defense. Up to now, the president promoted the wall as a way to curtail illegal immigration and stop the deadly flood of illicit drugs. The introduction of the wall’s military function is significant, especially in terms of funding it.
Roughly half of the spending bill is dedicated to the military for a total of over $654 billion allotted to the Pentagon’s base budget and overseas counterinsurgency operations. That’s enough to build the wall 26 times.
(Excerpt) Read more at theepochtimes.com ...
The more the left hate him, the more certain I am that he is doing well.
National defense, absolutely.
That sounds nice!
Trump does a lot of hand waving. I’d wait for results before uncorking the good stuff.
To make matters worse, the spending bill specifically prohibits Trump from building the kind of wall he wants.
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Whoever put this in the bill should be brought up on charges of treason. WTF!!!!
Use volunteers.
it was explained on the Adam Baldwin tweet that Trump suckered the Dems thinking he lost (just like everyone here on FR yesterday) but he supposedly was able to get what he wanted including full funding for the wall via OMB. I have to re-read that FR thread again..
There’s never going to be a wall.
Wishful thinking since the legislation says no wall. It wouldn’t take long for some court to say No, regardless of which pot he tries to take the money from. Trump screwed this one up and he’s going to have to get congressional cooperation from these near universal Never Trumpers to build the wall.
An omnibus bill is not a budget and isn’t binding in that sense.
Nice. I posted on another thread that Bill Mitchell tweeted about this earlier today.
Basically Trump is saying the wall is part of national security and therefore he will use the funds budgeted to the military to build/reinforce, etc.
Use the military to oversee the illegals being shipped back. Have the illegals making compressed earth blocks and then use the blocks to build the wall.
I love the fact that Trump thinks outside the box. The army Corp. Of engineers built dams along flood plains, why not a border wall?
“To make matters worse, the spending bill specifically prohibits Trump from building the kind of wall he wants”
As I read it, that only applies to the funds Congress specifically allocated to repairing and extending the border “fence” - so if Trump declared the border wall - his kind of wall - to be a military necessity, and as CIC directed the military to fund construction from THAT pot of money, then I don’t believe that provision in the budget applies.
If the left can turn the military into a tranny/homo experimentation lab, we can turn it into a construction team.
Seabees on steriods, sorta.
John Derbyshire, a former National Review columnist who was booted for un-PC remarks concerning nonsense from black columnists about how dangerous cops are to blacks, quotes an alt-right commenter on Trump:
http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/deep-state-rolls-trump-on-budget-immigration-is-this-the-end/
A friend has an adjective he deploys to describe Trump: “anticompetent.” A merely in-competent ruler, my friend says—like the child rulers who sometimes took the throne in old dynastic monarchies—could skate along without doing much harm by relying on advisors. Trump goes beyond that to anti-competent, sabotaging himself at every turn, taking advice from Deep Staters who sneer him behind his back and detest the people who voted for him.
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