McConnell is keeping the filibuster rule for legislation in order to deny the wall to Trump and America
“McConnell is keeping the filibuster rule for legislation in order to deny the wall to Trump and America”
There is a lot more riding on the filibuster than wall funding. I don’t think that it is what is driving McConnell.
Tellingly, McConnell has supported and engineered an increase to the ten year baseline, for barrier building ($1.6 billion/year). Although it does not allow President Trump to ram a full wall in a single term, it does allow significant improvements each year. It would spread out the amount of barrier that Border Patrol really wants (1,100 total miles) over ten years - if the political will remained.
It explicitly lets President Trump get a good bit built - basically all of it, if he gets re-elected, and maintains Republican majorities in Congress (possibly an incentive program for him).
It is more of a cautious compromise approach, rather than a real hard blocking effort. Early on, a lot of Republicans (and even several Democrats) supported real border security, but lacked confidence in how President Trump might execute the program - they did not want to be embarrassed, or see the effort discredited by poor execution. Trump was an unknown in holding public office.
Now President Trump has been proven as a good manager of the program, and a good steward of the funds. The risk has been reduced, and the confidence increased. There has been no crony corruption, no over-paying, no poor choices of priorities or designs for political grandstanding. Reasonable accommodations were made when Democratic lawmakers really wanted them, like the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge for Congressman Henry Cuellar.
A thorough analysis was conducted with input from Congress, and there is now relatively broad consensus that there is a professional and economically efficient plan to guide any spending they authorize. Professional budgeteers in OMB and on the Hill should be satisfied enough to sign off on their audits of the budget submissions. In the first year, it was an article of faith to ram that $1.6 billion/year into the baseline. McConnell took some risk to get that added.