Veto bill? ‘F---- that,’ I’m heading to Florida
Trump asked Congress in January to earmark a whopping $25 billion for its construction.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had reached a deal with Trump for DACA legislation in return for the wall cash that month, but Trump later backed out of the agreement.
Only a portion of the $1.6 billion in the new spending package can be used on new barriers. The bulk of the money will go to repairing existing fencing segments.
Trump’s Twitter veto threat was at odds with top members of his administration and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who had said Thursday that he was supportive of the measure. The White House also issued a formal statement of administration policy indicating Trump would sign the bill. Several advisers inside and outside the White House said they suspected the tweet was just Trump blowing off steam.
But Trump’s most conservative adherents took his threat seriously and were devastated he didn’t follow through.
“I will never sign another bill like this again,” right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter quoted Trump as saying and bluntly adding, “Yeah because you’ll be impeached.”
Longtime conservative commentator and Trump loyalist Matt Drudge also took a shot at the President, emblazoning his namesake website with a scathing “FAKE VETO” banner.
The bill easily passed by the House Thursday.
The will-he, won’t-he veto episode ONCE AGAIN, federal funding for the arts has been spared.
The $1.3 trillion budget signed Friday by President Trump continues support for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies he sought to eliminate.
It’s the second straight year Congress restored funding in response to Trump’s calls for ending such programs as the NEH, the NEA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The money is used for everything from scholarly research to local theater productions.
The NEH and NEA each will receive $3 million increases, to just under $153 million per agency. The CPB’s budget was kept the same, at $465 million.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is getting a $9 million increase, to $240 million. came hours after the Senate passed the spending package, which keeps the government running through September.
But the bill faced some animosity in the Senate, especially from fiscal conservative Sen. Rand Paul, who was hoping that Trump would veto the bill.
“Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses — and parties,” the Kentucky senator tweeted after the bill cleared the Senate. “No one has read it. Congress is broken.”
The omnibus spending bill was supposed to be an antidote to the stopgap measures Congress has been forced to pass — five in this fiscal year alone — to keep government temporarily running amid partisan fiscal disputes.
Asked why he threatened to veto the bill, Trump told reporters that he had “looked very seriously” at it, but decided otherwise after considering “the incredible gains that we’ve been able to make for the military.”
The spending bill doesn’t include Democrat-favored subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchanges, which started faltering after Trump reversed some federal payments in his wider effort to scuttle the health care law. The bill also doesn’t resolve the fate of the Dreamers, who have been in legal gridlock since the Supreme Court declined to take up a Trump administration appeal.
Still, Democrats were beyond pleased with the bill Friday.
“We feel good,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “We produced a darn good bill.”