The real problem with voting funds for the Wall
Good point here:
The conservative consensus is that Democrats don’t want to fund President Trump’s wall because they hate him. Well, yes, Democrats do indeed hate President Trump, and yes, it’s a deep-seated hatred, a visceral, soul-rotting hatred, but that’s not the real reason they won’t fund the wall.
The biggest reason Democrats won’t even partially fund the wall is their absolute certainty that given the money, the president will actually build the thing.
President Trump’s not some out-of-the-loop politician who can be outmaneuvered by a Deep State whose embedded bureaucrats will tell him everything’s going swimmingly while they sabotage the project with cost overruns and endless delays. No, the president will know how much it should and will cost, how long it should and will take, and how to overcome government roadblocks. This is his wheelhouse. He’s done it his whole adult life.
And, since the wall is his signature issue, his personal passion, President Trump’s going to be all over the construction.
I think this is definitely the case.
Some more good points from a different article:
This would also be a good time for the administration to get its communications act together and correct several fallacies the opposition media have ingrained into the public’s consciousness – fallacies like that the wall is an exorbitant expense, when in reality it will save far more through reduced costs associated with illegal immigration, which currently costs the nation well over $150B each and every year. Heck, it will save money on the reduced need for border patrol personnel alone. Then there is the fallacy that a 2,000-mile border barrier is some major engineering challenge, when the U.S. has built over 46,000 miles of interstate highways, each mile of which required more complex engineering than setting a steel-bollard wall. And there is the self-obvious fallacy that agenda-driven politicians, open-borders advocates, and opposition media pundits know more about how to secure the border than border patrol agents who overwhelmingly are calling for a physical barrier.
Actually, the idea that the entire border needs to be walled is another fallacy. There are stretches that should behave a double fence and others where it may not be important. Funneling illegals into sectors that are easily patrolled is a big part of it. The San Diego fence was very effective, even if not as high tech as what is planned.
I will personally find a crocodile, for the moat. A country that cannot control it’s own borders, has ceased to exist.
One possible factor is the array of left-wing compliant federal judges. So far they have been moderately effective in stopping a number of Trump initiatives, but what happens if Congress provides specific funding for a wall?
In that case, these judges would have to defy the explicit intent and will of the people’s representatives, if they choose to stop the wall. On the other hand, if Trump is forced to go with the national security emergency tactic, then it will be a full-on legal war. These judges will say, “See, if the Congress wanted it they would have funded it; so we’re just upholding the will of the people against a rogue president.”
Not sure I understand the problem here.
Why would the Democrats vote in favor of keeping millions of their potential voters outside the voting booths?
(Though now that I think about it, they could always try to pass a law granting the right to vote, by absentee ballot, to non-resident non-citizens. I mean, why not?…)
If Trump does go the national security threat way to fund the wall and the idiot liberals go to a compliant judge to stop it, all that Trump should do and say is that he’ll keep the government shut until the legal challenges run their multi year course up to and including SCOTUS. No pay until all court cases are finished. The government should get going again about 2050. Also, we shouldn’t pay any Federal taxes since there won’t be a functioning Federal government. Let the states, as the Founding Fathers wanted, do the work of the people.
The latest at Fox News: “Trump doubles down on border wall, as polls show voters turning against his shutdown strategy”
I like that Trump’s message has been focused on the *human* cost of not having a border wall/fence.
This is typically the Democrats’ shtick: put a victim in front of the cameras (think: crying American-born child of illegal immigrant parents) and play on the public’s emotions to sell their side. The needless deaths of Officer Singh, Pierce Corcoran, the Long Island teens murdered by MS-13 immigrants should be mentioned, not just because it can be effective, but because the media and Democrats won’t acknowledge them.
Maybe Trump could call the Dems bluff and just pull back Border Patrol and ICE. Let them in for 30 days.
I have read that some Texas and maybe other state ranchers will fight the taking of land for the barrier. Not that much land is needed and it is mostly sand, rattlesnakes and scrub. Not much for a cow to eat.
I just don’t put too much faith in the polls as the wording is questionable in many and the sample selection is a factor.
You can read the questions asked in the Quinnipiac poll here. They seem pretty straightforward and unbiased to me.
Is it at all possible to use cartel drug money gotten from raids we have confiscated? Many have said that would more than pay for the walls.
Polls told us Hillary was a shoo-in. Polls have shown for years that a majority of Americans oppose illegal immigration.
Good point, though. Trump wouldn’t just talk about it. He’d build it.
The first pretty straightforward and unbiased to me. question in that poll.
Overall, do you believe that immigration is good for the country or bad for the country?
No mention of illegal immigration, a standard DNC talking point. Nice work, Ann.
The Dems are looking at the long game, measured in generations. Every anchor baby plopped out north of the Rio Grande is a citizen and in 18 years will be eligible to vote. If anyone thinks that they will not be left-side voters by a 70-30 split should have their meds adjusted.
The Dems supported a wall in previous times because they knew it would never happen. As the article says, today it will be. Remember that ice rink in NYC none of the politicians could get done… and then DJT volunteered to get-er-done, and did. Its the same game that was played with ACA: the Rep Congress repeatedly voted bills to repeal it in its entirety, knowing that Obama would never sign the bill into law. As soon as we got a President who would sign it, no one would write the bill… Its all about optics for the next election.
In 2009 $5 billion was spent on Cash For Clunkers. So its not really about the money.
Two related points: First, how many people are feeling any pain from the ‘shut down’ beyond nonessential federal employees, and why are nonessential employees sucking on the government teat in the first place? Secondly, is it not obvious that the dems need illegals to vote, plus ‘ballot harvesting’ to acquire power?
Mike:
You are incorrect about the ACA.
After Trump was elected, the Republican House passed a bill repealing it. The Senate (with the GOP having only a tiny majority) was very close to passing it. Then John McCain, in a dramatic surprise move, voted against it and killed it. Murkowski and Collins also voted the same way. I discuss what happened here and here.
Has no one here read Victor Davis Hanson’s “Mexifornia”??
It was published some 15-18 years ago!
We are becoming a country of schlubs. Watched over by Big Sister Nancy and her Schmuchie Chuckie. Trump is our last hope. Last.
Cicero,
I have heard it said that Trump isn’t our last hope – he’s ‘their’ last hope.
I like it better that way!
Mike K,
Good catch.
Ann is a troll.
Neo- Not to quibble over semantics, but as you showed in the linked earlier posts, McCain spiked a “fix” for ACA, dubbed a “skinny repeal”, hardly what one would call a true repeal where the act would be ripped from the Federal register, along with all the follow-on regulations it spawned. And there was nothing in the way of a “replace” in sight, which supports the idea that the repeal was not a serious move.
Not mentioned as a factor here is the report that, in it’s last stop-gap funding Continuing Resolution, Congress only provided enough funding to fully fund the EBT (food stamps, etc.) payments–that reportedly go out to 50 million Americans–though the end of January.
Moreover, Congress only authorized and appropriated partial funding for the almost $5 billion dollar monthly cost to load up EBT cards for February, and no funding was authorized and appropriated for this program for March.
According to the report, the CR contained no funding for the much smaller WIC program, which is now, apparently, running on whatever is already in the pipeline.
If this report is accurate, you can imagine the impact that not fully funding EBT cards for February will have, and I am sure that everyone in Congress and in the White House is very much aware of the potential this holds for massive “unrest.”
Note also that the Democrats are convinced (my assertion, not what they’ve said) that should Trump win on the wall funding, and actually build it, as I agree he would, he will have delivered on his signature campaign promise and cruise to reelection in 2020.
McCain spiked a “fix” for ACA, dubbed a “skinny repeal”, hardly what one would call a true repeal where the act would be ripped from the Federal register, along with all the follow-on regulations it spawned.
It’s not that easy. Obamacare destroyed the existing healthcare system in the country. Hospital administrators loved it as the regulations, especially the Electronic Health Record, or “EHR,” were so expensive that doctors all sold their practices to hospitals and became salaried employees.
When I was still in practice, I finally bought an electronic billing system because, at that time, I had 176 contracts with various entities, HMOs, PPOs, etc, It cost me $36,000. The complete EHR for individual practices, especially solo GP practices that already had 80% overhead, was prohibitive. I think that was a big part of the motive.
In cities, doctors are no longer small business people. They are employees. The days when you could open an office and hang up a “shingle,” are gone.
Mike:
Now you say that the bill the GOP actually voted on to repeal Obamacare just wasn’t a good enough bill. Well, it certainly wasn’t, and there were plenty of reasons for that besides “the GOP was just fooling around and didn’t mean it.”
Also, your original beef wasn’t that, it was this:
The previous Senate—the one under Obama—had 54 GOP senators, but of course it was known that repeal was futile because Obama would veto such a bill and they could not override. However, by the time Trump came around, they only had 51 GOP senators. That meant that a bill had to be written that would get the majority of them, which was nearly impossible—but not because most of the GOP senators didn’t want one. It was because the GOP had to get to 51 votes (with Pence breaking a tie if they only got 50). With some of the usual RINOs in place, the GOP simply didn’t have those votes, but the lack of votes doesn’t mean the Republicans as a whole didn’t want to pass such a bill, it just meant that they couldn’t get nearly every single person on board that was necessary.
“No one would write the bill” is incorrect. They wrote the bill that had the best chance of passing. They also had plenty of ideas for replace, ideas that had been written about at great length and they also couldn’t agree on that, so the idea was to do the repeal first and then wrangle over the replace part.
But it was not some sort of “let’s pretend” game.
Mike —
Please remember that in politics, as in engineering, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
Richard — You are preaching to the choir on that one.
Mike K. — Understood. I was stating what I see a “repeal” would look like; like the repeal of prohibition: Boom! Booze is legal again. Such a repeal would have left a vacuum since there was not a replacement system waiting in the wings to be voted in the next day. We all know that “we can then talk about…[insert issue here] later” can take a long time.
The medical system (care + payment) is as complex as the economy itself and should not be placed in the hands of people who must seek re-election every other year. And, no, I don’t have any who might be the better choice. Its good to be old.