During the partial government shutdown, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were begging the President to give up on trying to get funding for the border wall temporarily in order to get the government opened up and the federal workers paid.
Pelosi had told President Trump that they can continue to negotiate once the government is reopened.
Now she has (not surprisingly) went back on her promise.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters: “There’s not going to be any wall money in the legislation” to fund border security for the rest of this year.
Instead, Pelosi said funding for more ports of entry or additional border security technology was open for negotiation. She added that the 17 House and Senate negotiators should decide the components of the nation’s border security.
But the Democratic negotiators went a step further from Pelosi’s prohibition on wall funds, unveiling a detailed opening position containing no money for any type of additional physical barriers on the border to control the flow of undocumented immigrants and illegal drugs.
Previously, Democrats have supported $1.3 billion for new border fencing this year or improvements to existing fencing.
Instead, she says she’s okay with the idea of a mediocre fencing system that won’t do a bit of good. In fact, it would only make things worse.
The Washinton Examiner reports,
Pelosi won’t budge on funding for the wall as envisioned by President Trump. As far as a physical barrier is concerned, the Normandy-style fencing is all that the speaker will support.
“If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall,” Pelosi said. “Are there places where enhanced fencing, Normandy fencing, will work? Let them have that discussion.”
Again, and as Ferrechio notes, this type of Normandy-style fencing is meant to stop vehicles, not people on foot. Currently, U.S. Border Patrol employs it to do exactly that. But even when welded together with rebar to create a sort of fence, the barriers are still very low.
As Allied forces learned in 1944, you can hop over them or walk around them.
The Democrats are truly playing right into President Trump’s plan and the fruit of it will come soon enough. Watch and see.
dan