Why not seek border wall under Republican congress?
January 15, 2019 7:45 AM Subscribe
Why did Trump wait for the new Congress to demand border wall money?
Until a couple of weeks ago, and since Pres. Trump took office, the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. By all accounts, majorities in both supported Trump's immigration policies. Were there any legal reasons he could not simply propose standalone legislation during that time to fund a wall?
(I’m not looking for political analysis, just a factual answer.)
Until a couple of weeks ago, and since Pres. Trump took office, the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. By all accounts, majorities in both supported Trump's immigration policies. Were there any legal reasons he could not simply propose standalone legislation during that time to fund a wall?
(I’m not looking for political analysis, just a factual answer.)
There were no legal reasons. You say you don't want political analysis, but the answer is political - funding for the wall would not have passed the senate even under unified control. Now that the House is under opposition control, it's possible for Trump to appear to be fighting his enemies, as exogenous said, whereas before it would have been an 'internal' fight.
posted by dbx at 8:07 AM on January 15, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by dbx at 8:07 AM on January 15, 2019 [12 favorites]
Under the previous Congress, Republicans did control both houses but you have to remember that the Senate Filibuster rule still applies to normal legislation*. Which means for all practical purposes you need 60 votes in the Senate to pass something. The Republications do not have 60 votes for this...they may in fact not even have a unified bloc for The Wall as the wall is deeply unpopular.
*The exception to this is the Budget Reconciliation process which is not subject to the 60 vote threshold. This is how they passed the tax cuts. However you only get one of these per year and there are also lots of other restrictions in place on what is contained in these bills.
posted by mmascolino at 8:44 AM on January 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
*The exception to this is the Budget Reconciliation process which is not subject to the 60 vote threshold. This is how they passed the tax cuts. However you only get one of these per year and there are also lots of other restrictions in place on what is contained in these bills.
posted by mmascolino at 8:44 AM on January 15, 2019 [3 favorites]
There was actually an aborted deal to build a wall in exchange for DACA in 2018. It didn't happen because Trump blew it up.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:50 AM on January 15, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 8:50 AM on January 15, 2019 [9 favorites]
It's less a fight and more a hostage-taking at this point, with the President scrambling to hold the media's attention like it's a rough proxy for Stockholm Syndrome. But they're not really fighting over a wall - I'd be surprised if there were more than a half-dozen folks in Congress who really thought Trump's wall was either possible, effective, or a good idea. They're fighting over who gets to "win" and who gets to define with the battle was about. You say you want a factual answer, not a political one, but that just doesn't work in the current environment. Trump doesn't care about anybody else's facts; he's got his own facts.
posted by johnwilcox at 10:18 AM on January 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by johnwilcox at 10:18 AM on January 15, 2019 [2 favorites]
You could replace the question with almost any aspect of the Republican agenda: "why not seek ... under Republican congress?"
* National limits on abortions to pre-20 weeks, no exceptions
* Alternatively: declare fetuses to be persons with full legal rights
* Maximum income tax rate of 10%
* Law requiring military spending to be double that on all other departments
* Immediate deportation of any unauthorized resident/non-citizen
* End of federal education funding
* Grandfather citizenship requirements
* End to recognition of trans people; only birth certificate genders can be used on fed documents
* Require fed-recognized ID for voting in federal elections
* End all science department funding
* Require all federal documents and congressional activity to be done in English only
... and so on. The answer is twofold: One, as mentioned, most legislation faces filibuster issues; they need a 60-vote majority to push through anything controversial, and they don't have it. Two, while they're all monsters who support monsters, they're all monstrous in different ways - none of them wants to promote someone else's agenda unless they get their own covered as well.
Okay, threefold: they're incompetent at actually creating legislation; recent cuts have gotten rid of the staffers who can write laws with the complexity required to accomplish their agenda. They can tweet short buzzword-laden phrases easily; writing a law that would call fetuses persons is not a simple matter. The laws that would be simple to create don't have wide support.
In short: they don't want to pass their agenda; they want to complain about how Democrats are ruining everything. They want to be perceived as fighting for their goals; they don't want to reach them.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:51 AM on January 15, 2019 [5 favorites]
* National limits on abortions to pre-20 weeks, no exceptions
* Alternatively: declare fetuses to be persons with full legal rights
* Maximum income tax rate of 10%
* Law requiring military spending to be double that on all other departments
* Immediate deportation of any unauthorized resident/non-citizen
* End of federal education funding
* Grandfather citizenship requirements
* End to recognition of trans people; only birth certificate genders can be used on fed documents
* Require fed-recognized ID for voting in federal elections
* End all science department funding
* Require all federal documents and congressional activity to be done in English only
... and so on. The answer is twofold: One, as mentioned, most legislation faces filibuster issues; they need a 60-vote majority to push through anything controversial, and they don't have it. Two, while they're all monsters who support monsters, they're all monstrous in different ways - none of them wants to promote someone else's agenda unless they get their own covered as well.
Okay, threefold: they're incompetent at actually creating legislation; recent cuts have gotten rid of the staffers who can write laws with the complexity required to accomplish their agenda. They can tweet short buzzword-laden phrases easily; writing a law that would call fetuses persons is not a simple matter. The laws that would be simple to create don't have wide support.
In short: they don't want to pass their agenda; they want to complain about how Democrats are ruining everything. They want to be perceived as fighting for their goals; they don't want to reach them.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:51 AM on January 15, 2019 [5 favorites]
According to a January 5, 2019 NYT article "How the Border Wall Is Boxing Trump In,"
As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.and the logistics related to what happened to potential legislation under a GOP-controlled Congress appears to be related to this:
[...] To many conservative activists who have pressed for decades for sharp reductions in both illegal and legal immigration — and some of the Republican lawmakers who are allied with them — a physical barrier on the border with Mexico is barely relevant, little more than a footnote to a long list of policy changes they believe are needed to fix a broken system.
A report released in March by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that Border Patrol agents on the front lines said they needed more technology and additional personnel to curb illegal immigration and drug traffic, with less than one half of one percent mentioning a wall.posted by Little Dawn at 11:03 AM on January 15, 2019
Mr. Schumer, now the Senate Democratic leader, has insisted for two years that any spending agreements contain language barring federal money for Mr. Trump’s wall. Republican leaders went along each time, even as the president became increasingly irate, once coming close to vetoing a spending package on the day of the White House signing ceremony.
Other reasons are reported by Politico on January 8, 2019 to include:
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said in an exit interview with the Los Angeles Times last month that Trump bailed on wanting a solid concrete a long time ago.posted by Little Dawn at 11:58 AM on January 15, 2019
“To be honest, it’s not a wall. The president still says ‘wall’... but we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it,” Kelly told the outlet.
From a constitutional/legal standpoint, having coequal branches of government typically means that negotiation and compromise is required to pass legislation:
posted by Little Dawn at 12:16 PM on January 15, 2019
Trump has also shown little appetite to make a bipartisan compromise on immigration. He turned down a chance to get $25 billion for his border wall earlier this year after an extensive back and forth with Schumer and other senators. He later lobbied against a bill providing deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants and $25 billion in border wall funding because he wanted cuts to legal immigration as well.The reporting suggests that Trump absolutely could have proposed legislation, but the main legal challenge related to the success of those proposals is that America is not a dictatorship.
posted by Little Dawn at 12:16 PM on January 15, 2019
As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with facts or legality.
Trump seems to relish in being the big dog, and up 'til now he's been supported and enabled by a Republican establishment afraid for their own reelection chances.
The wall funding became a bigger issue when Trump realized he was no longer going to have a majority in the House, and the most reasonable explanation seems to be that he is trying to establish dominance by forcing the new House leadership to capitulate.
Some people would call this political, but I don't really believe that to be the case. If you look at it through a non-political lens, it looks very similar to a businessperson who is used to being in full control and in charge, playing hardball negotiations with a vendor. If he can establish that he's the big dog to be feared to the vendor, it will be easier for him to steer the relationship and get preferential and deferential treatment.
This might have been a miscalculation or a misunderstanding of how the US system of government works. Trump hasn't experienced Congress showing any significant amount of fortitude up until now, and he may have finally overplayed his hand against a coequal branch of government. Again, I feel that this has a lot to do with his particular business background.
Others have already explained why these measures didn't pass with Republican control. These issues become the focus now because Trump is trying to establish dominance. But what happens next is political. We either see the Republicans decide that this is not the hill to die on, and work with the Democrats to arrive at a veto-proof majority, which will have interesting repercussions for 45, or the Democrats cave, which seems unlikely, or the shutdown persists, which is possible but seems less likely with each passing day.
posted by jgreco at 2:42 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]
Trump seems to relish in being the big dog, and up 'til now he's been supported and enabled by a Republican establishment afraid for their own reelection chances.
The wall funding became a bigger issue when Trump realized he was no longer going to have a majority in the House, and the most reasonable explanation seems to be that he is trying to establish dominance by forcing the new House leadership to capitulate.
Some people would call this political, but I don't really believe that to be the case. If you look at it through a non-political lens, it looks very similar to a businessperson who is used to being in full control and in charge, playing hardball negotiations with a vendor. If he can establish that he's the big dog to be feared to the vendor, it will be easier for him to steer the relationship and get preferential and deferential treatment.
This might have been a miscalculation or a misunderstanding of how the US system of government works. Trump hasn't experienced Congress showing any significant amount of fortitude up until now, and he may have finally overplayed his hand against a coequal branch of government. Again, I feel that this has a lot to do with his particular business background.
Others have already explained why these measures didn't pass with Republican control. These issues become the focus now because Trump is trying to establish dominance. But what happens next is political. We either see the Republicans decide that this is not the hill to die on, and work with the Democrats to arrive at a veto-proof majority, which will have interesting repercussions for 45, or the Democrats cave, which seems unlikely, or the shutdown persists, which is possible but seems less likely with each passing day.
posted by jgreco at 2:42 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks all. The consensus seems to be that Trump could have introduced a bill for border wall funding, legally & procedurally. But he didn’t, for various calculations.
Re the political considerations — I didn’t mean to imply that I’m not interested in them, or that they weren’t in fact primary, or sole. I too have thoughts along those lines, but I needed to know the factual, legal situation first.
posted by LonnieK at 5:44 PM on January 16, 2019
Re the political considerations — I didn’t mean to imply that I’m not interested in them, or that they weren’t in fact primary, or sole. I too have thoughts along those lines, but I needed to know the factual, legal situation first.
posted by LonnieK at 5:44 PM on January 16, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
No.
Why did Trump wait for the new Congress to demand border wall money?
There is some concise analysis in this piece by Fallows:posted by exogenous at 8:02 AM on January 15, 2019 [27 favorites]