I'LL VETO!( NEXT TIME!)
Prez threatens nix of $1.3T budget but inks it to avert shutdown
Hours after threatening a last-minute veto, President Trump on Friday grudgingly signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that he said contained “a lot of things we shouldn’t have” but was crucial for national security.
“I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump warned at a ceremony in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
“As a matter of national security, I’ll sign this omnibus budget bill. There are a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced — if we want to build our military, we were forced to have.”
Trump said the hike in defense spending — more than $60 billion more than last year — would enable the military to acquire more state-of-the-art aircraft, submarines and missile-defense systems and give those serving a pay raise.
“We have to have, by far, the strongest military in the world. And this will be the strongest military we ever had,” he added.
Every federal department will get more money except the State Department, which will see a decrease of 5.9 percent.
Defense spending will increase by 10.2 percent, Homeland Security by 12.5 percent and Veterans Affairs by 9.5 percent. Transportation got the largest hike by percentage, with a 46.7 percent increase.
Trump lashed out at lawmakers for sending him the 2,200page bill only hours before the midnight shutdown deadline.
“They created a series of documents that nobody was able to read. You tell me who can read that quickly,” he said, vowing to never sign another last-minute spending plan.
He blasted congressional Democrats, who would not agree to give Trump $25 billion for the border wall in exchange for relief for Dreamers, or illegal immigrants brought here as children. Dreamers were protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump decided to discontinue in September.
“DACA recipients have been treated extremely badly by the Democrats. We wanted to include DACA, we wanted to have them in this bill, 800,000 people, and actually it could even be more. And we wanted to include DACA in this bill. The Democrats would not do it. They would not do it,” said Trump, who only got $1.6 billion for work on existing portions of the US-Mexico barrier.
Democrats got much of what they wanted in the package, including continued support for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies Trump and the GOP wanted to eliminate.
It’s the second straight year Congress restored funding in response to Trump’s calls for ending such programs.
The president also demanded an end to the filibuster rule so the Senate’s razor-thin GOP majority could pass legislation by a simple majority, and for line-item veto power.
Trump earlier threatened to veto the bill and was reportedly fuming all morning about details he didn’t like.
“I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BOR- DER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Trump tweeted just after 9 a.m.
But the White House later announced a bill-signing ceremony at 1 p.m.
“I looked very seriously at the veto. I was thinking about doing the veto. But because of the incredible gains we’ve been able to make for the military, that overrode any of our thinking,” Trump said.