Trump delays from wanting money for border wall

As the White House approached the 100 day mark of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, he was to be celebrated as turning the page from the recent so-called dark past, as he made America Great Again. Yet, he also faced the task to still the wagging tongues that said his legislative actions were a string of defeats; so the president made a concession on Tuesday: he could wait on asking for money in the federal budget to build the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico to avoid a government shutdown.

While it could still be considered a concession, it could also be considered a pragmatic way to avoid another real defeat, after a federal justice blocked his controversial travel ban, and the American Health Care Act, (his replacement for the much maligned Obamacare) went down in flames. With the inclusion of the ban, and the words of his budget director, Mark Mulvaney, who insisted less than 48 hours earlier, “ We want wall funding. We want [immigration] agents. Those are our priorities.” Trump’s win-win desires could have had him bewailing his misfortunes on the 100th day of his nascent presidency.

As Reuters reported, “Trump had run the risk of being blamed by Democrats for a shutdown whose start would coincide with the day he marks 100 days in office. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer welcomed Trump's Monday night comments and noted that there were opponents of the wall among Republicans too.”

“It would remove the prospect of a needless fight over a poison pill proposal that members of both parties don’t support. ... If the threat of the wall is removed, as I hope is the case, our negotiations can continue and we can, hopefully, resolve all of the outstanding issues by Friday,” Schumer said Tuesday, on the Senate floor.

As most have noticed the constant flip-flopping is almost to be expected, but not on this one, a campaign pledge designed to rally the base after his infamous, and untrue, remarks that there were murders and rapists from Mexico, ready to pounce on America. Now, that list has been expanded to include illegal drugs, bound for New York, our most identifiable, and iconic, city, and that it was “soft on crime.”

“It is an outrageous statement, and is absurd on its face and ignores a quarter century of progress in this city in bringing down crime,” Mayor de Blasio said.”We did not become the safest big city in America by being ‘soft on crime.’”

As CBS News reported, “The mayor added that New York City just experienced the safest three month period in the city’s history, and he hopes the president will reconsider his position on the issue.”

Offering a mix - maybe for the future --  is Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, “who represents the southwestern border state of Arizona, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, said there is a need for a wall in some border locations and alternative deterrents in others.”  

He also said, “a lot of us have been pushing for additional border security funding for a while, but solitary 2,000 mile wall has never been a must-have for anybody in a border state.”

Trump, of course, feels otherwise , and using the medium of social media, tweeted the contrary, and said, “If... the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be!”

Reuters also stated that “Trump has said Mexico will repay the United States for the wall if Congress funds it first. But the Mexican government is adamant it will not provide any financing and Trump has not laid out a plan to compel Mexico to pay. Department of Homeland Security internal estimates have placed the total cost of a border barrier at about $21.6 billion.”

Going beyond the wall, if there is no budget covering April 29 to Sept. 30 “before 12:01 a.m. (0401 GMT) on Saturday, government funds will halt and hundreds of thousands of the country's several million federal employees will be temporarily laid off.”  

The furlough of federal workers would affect the closing of national parks, and even government web sites, which would not be updated, causing hundred of headaches across the country, The feeling in Congress is that there must be “a short-term extension of current spending, possibly of one week's duration, in order to finish up negotiations on the longer-term bill for funding through the end of September.”

“Yeah, it looks like it,” said Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Senate Appropriations Committee member, when asked by a Reuters reporter about the likelihood of a short-term extension. But, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, however, that “it was too soon to talk about such a possibility and that negotiations were still under way to reach a longer-term deal.”

The president's fellow Republicans control both chambers of Congress, but the current spending bill, which has to be passed by Friday night, will need 60 votes to clear the 100-member Senate, where Republicans hold 52 seats.

On the table are principally $30 billion in new defense and border spending, $18 billion dollars in cuts for domestic spending to balance out the increase in defense, including the money to strip out federal funding for the so-called sanctuary cities. And, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced at the end of last week, that he had sent a letter to those city and local governments asking for a letter of compliance, there was also defiance. Earlier in January Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had said, with conviction, that his city would remain so

On Tuesday, there was an unexpected change,  “a federal judge in California, blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a threat to take away funds from sanctuary cities -- the latest blow from the federal judiciary to President Donald Trump's immigration agenda,” reported CNN.

“In his ruling, Judge William H. Orrick sided with Santa Clara County, the city of San Francisco and other jurisdictions, who argued that a threat to take away federal funds from cities that do not cooperate with some federal immigration enforcement could be unconstitutional,” they concluded.

The ruling is applied nationwide and the Orrick “blocked the government from enforcing a key portion of Trump's January executive order on immigration, which ordered the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department to block cities who do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement from receiving federal funds.”

It is a partial move, and “does not block the government from enforcing conditions on federal grants nor does it block the government from creating a definition of sanctuary jurisdictions -- but the government will not be able to block federal funds from going to those cities as Trump ordered.”

Meanwhile, health care is still on the burner, and the president has said that he will remove subsidies that some low-income people receive to obtain coverage on the marketplaces created by President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Rumor has it that Trump will horse-trade to keep these, or at least some of them, in place, to get their cooperation for his pet projects, as they stand now. Heretofore the deal was for every dollar in subsidies there would be a dollar to pay for the border wall, but the wall is off the budgetary table, at least for now.

There are 237 Republicans in the House and there are five vacancies, and 216 are needed to pass a vote on the budget. In combination with the aforementioned with the Senate, Trump needs Democratic votes. And, if more than 21 House Republicans refuse to support the bill, it will fail, without Democratic support, thus the compromise.

In 2014 the GOP sued to remove the subsidies, saying that Obama had no constitutional grounds to do so, but with no explicit action from Congress, the judge ruled in favor of the opposition, but the ruling was put on hold.

Shutdowns, of course, are a public relations nightmare for any administration, and Trump’s is no exception. Obama had his 16-day experience in 2013 and Clinton had his in 1995.  As Wikipedia states,  that was “the result of conflicts between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress over funding for Medicare, education, the environment, and public health in the 1996 federal budget”.

Former presidential candidate, Ted Cruz has supported a shut down, four years ago, and is likely to do sot this year. On the other hand, Schumer has said previously, perhaps facetiously, that if Trump does not interfere, then all will be well.

There is some wiggle room, that was created, last December, by Obama when there was a provision to borrow money till August 2018, with debt ceiling adjustments, but as with all things associated with Obama, the GOP, in the person of Trump, will revile it.