Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi think they’ve pulled one over on President Trump, but their smug smiles will turn to grimaces of dismay when they realize that the President will get credit — not blame — for insisting that Congress fund the wall and secure America’s borders.
In a raucous meeting with the President in the Oval Office, they pretended to seek a solution on “border security,” but really just reiterated their obstinate opposition to any funding for the wall.
Schumer really should have been fretting, rather than gloating, when Donald Trump — a famously wiley and effective negotiator — eagerly accepted his challenge to take responsibility for a partial government shutdown.
The last time we faced the threat of a government shutdown, President Trump grudgingly signed a stopgap funding bill that didn’t fully fund the border wall in order to ensure that our military remained fully funded. As he did so,though, he swore that he would “never sign another bill like this again.”
Chuck and Nancy gloated over the outcome, and apparently assumed they could pull off a repeat despite the President’s vow. Now, though, defense spending is not on the table, putting the Democrat leaders in a much less advantageous negotiating position.
The Democrats’ arguments against funding a border wall are, moreover, little more than disingenuous rhetoric built on lies.
Their central claim is that the $5 billion President Trump wants for wall construction is simply too expensive, but that concern rings hollow when one recalls how eagerly they approved a $1.3 trillion Omnibus spending bill during the last shutdown fight.
The idea that these Democrats, who have spent their careers advocating for lavish public spending, suddenly developed a sense of fiscal responsibility is laughable, especially since the border wall will pay for itself in a matter of years even if it only stops a small fraction of the illegal aliens breaching our porous border.
Even more absurd is their claim that the wall will somehow be both ineffective and “immoral.”Nonsense. If stopping people from crossing the border illegally is immoral, as they suggest, then what could be immoral about an “ineffective” wall?
House Democrat leaders have already made clear that mass amnesty for illegal aliens is one of their top priorities, and they know that a border wall is the gravest threat to their dream of turning the illegal immigrant population into a perpetual Democrat voter base.
Encouraged by Democrats’ promises of amnesty, the number of people flooding our border is climbing back towards record highs. With them are coming drugs, criminals, cheap labor that undermines the position of the American worker, and a lawless mess on our southern border that has already fueled decades of unspeakable human misery.
The situation is being kept in check only by President Trump’s steadfastness on other, non-wall enforcement priorities like expanding the Border Patrol, tightening asylum rules, and deploying thousands of troops to the border.
Democrats have tried to frustrate each of these efforts with lies and mischaracterizations, even accusing our Border Patrol agents of war crimes when they used tear gas to break up a crowd of violent migrants (something the Obama administration did hundreds of times),but the people have consistently supported the President’s vital border security initiatives, and they’ll do so again in the wall funding fight.
The American people want their government to function and their border secure. So does President Trump, which is why he can’t let Chuck and Nancy keep denying the people the border security they desperately need.
They think they saddled President Trump with the blame for a partial shutdown of the government, but instead, he’ll take full credit for using a shutdown to fight for the safety and security of the American people.