Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trump signs spending bill but bashes it
He pulls back veto threat, cites military funding need
WASHINGTON — Hours after threatening a veto, President Donald Trump said Friday afternoon that he had signed the sweeping $1.3 trillion spending bill passed just after midnight by the Senate and averted a government shutdown.
In a morning tweet, Trump said he might veto the omnibus bill because it does nothing to address the fate of young illegal aliens protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and does not fully fund his border wall.
But speaking to reporters at the White House less than four hours later, Trump said he had decided to sign the bill despite his reservations, arguing that it provides much-needed funding for the military, including a pay increase for troops and new equipment.
“My highest duty is to keep America safe,” Trump said. “We need to take care of our military.”
Still, he voiced disdain for the way the hasty way the bill was passed.
“Nobody read it,” Trump said. Echoing criticism from those who voted against the measure, Trump added, “It’s only hours old.
“I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump said.
He also called for an overhaul of Senate rules to allow for simple-majority votes
on all bills and appealed to Congress for line-item veto power to kill specific spending items he disagrees with. The Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that a Congress-passed line-item veto was unconstitutional.
Trump’s announcement that he had signed the bill, which he had teased in a separate tweet an hour before the White House event began, capped a busy morning in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Several aides scrambled to persuade the president not to follow through with his threat.
In his Friday morning tweet, Trump said that those protected from deportation by the deferred-action program have been “totally abandoned” by Congress, and he blamed the Democrats. At the signing, he said to the program’s participants, “The Republicans are with you.”
“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 BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,” Trump said in his tweet, referring to the deferred-action program by its initials.
Trump, who sought to cancel the program last fall, was seeking a deal that would give Democrats protections they sought for the program’s recipients in exchange for additional funding of $25 billion for his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.
The measure includes nearly $1.6 billion for border security, including new technology and repairs to existing barriers — but not the wall specifically, as he claimed Wednesday on Twitter. It provides $641 million for about 33 miles of fencing, but prohibits building a concrete structure or other prototypes the president has considered and allocates the rest of the funding for new aircraft, sensors and surveillance technology.
In his Friday afternoon remarks, Trump expressed disappointment and said he was “not happy” that the spending bill did not allocate the full $25 billion that the administration had requested for the wall.
But at times he seemed optimistic, saying that $1.6 billion “does start the wall” and promising to “make that $1.6 billion go very, very far.”
People familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president was frustrated with the bill and the coverage it was receiving, particularly on Fox News, where critics took aim at the level of spending in the bill.
“He doesn’t care as much about the spending levels, but he knows all of his conservative friends do,” said a senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly.
Lawmakers have left town on a two-week recess, some of them on overseas trips. The House passed the bill midday Thursday, and the Senate cleared the measure shortly after midnight.
Trump had until midnight Friday to sign a bill or a government shutdown would ensue.
The legislation funds the federal government for the remainder of the 2018 budget year, through Sept. 30, directing $700 billion toward the military and $591 billion to domestic agencies. Defense spending is set to jump $80 billion over previously authorized spending levels, while domestic spending rises by $63 billion.
The spending bill is widely expected to be the last major legislation that Congress will pass before the November midterm elections, which had increased pressure to jam the bill full of odds and ends, with provisions addressing everything from gun safety to invasive carp.
LAWMAKERS WEIGH THREAT
The lack of an immigration deal in the spending bill had already set off a round of recriminations, with the White House aggressively trying to deflect responsibility for the failure.
Trump’s veto threat only intensified the blame game Friday morning.
“Let’s not forget that you ended DACA and torpedoed every possible bipartisan fix. This is on you,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, wrote on Twitter.
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., accused Trump of making a “loser’s bluff.”
“Go ahead and veto the omnibus over DACA. We dare you,” Pocan said on Twitter. “Everyone knows you’re the reason DACA recipients are abandoned.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers who opposed the spending bill on other grounds used the occasion to urge Trump to follow through with his threat.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and a friend of the president, said in a tweet that the group would “fully support” a veto, adding that Congress should pass a short-term budget resolution while Trump and congressional leaders “negotiate a better deal for the forgotten men and women of America.”
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., also encouraged Trump to veto the legislation.
“Please do, Mr. President,” he tweeted. “I am just down the street and will bring you a pen. The spending levels without any offsets are grotesque, throwing all of our children under the bus. Totally irresponsible.”
Other senior Republicans began making their own Twitter pleas urging Trump to sign the bill. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn rattled off several policy wins in a Friday tweet directed at the president, including a gun-related measure long championed by the Texas Republican that was included in the spending bill.
“While [Democrats] obstructed normal appropriations process, forcing an Omnibus, the benefits of Omnibus to national security, border security, opioid crisis, infrastructure, school safety and fixing gun background check system are important and will save lives. realDonaldTrump,” Cornyn tweeted Friday.
“Art of the deal wrecker,” was how Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., sized up the president’s veto threat Friday morning. He urged the president to sign the bill.
“One day after his own [Office of Management and Budget] director said he would sign it, that he’s now saying he’s thinking about vetoing it,” Kaine told reporters. “What, does he just want to create more confusion and chaos? I don’t get it.”
Kaine said Trump’s professed concern about the deferred-action participants is not sincere because he walked away from an offer from Democrats weeks ago to protect them in exchange for more border security funding.
“He was the one who poured cold water on it and killed it among the Republicans just a month ago,” Kaine said.
“I hope he doesn’t do it. That’s my reaction,” Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., said of Trump’s threat.
Although Trump aides declared Thursday that he intended to sign the bill, there were signs of his displeasure with various aspects of it.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., rushed to the White House to reassure Trump.
The president was upset with the amount of money for his border wall, and he griped about a proposed tunnel between New York and New Jersey — a project pushed by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. — that Trump has ferociously tried to block as part of the negotiations.
Veto threats were made then, too, but after conversations with Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the White House issued a statement saying Trump supported the bill.
“Is the president going to sign the bill? The answer is yes,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters Thursday afternoon at the White House.
On Thursday, the White House also issued a lengthy release titled “The American People Win as President Donald J. Trump’s Priorities are Funded,” with a long list of specific items in the legislation.
Asked about the president’s tweet Friday, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement: “The tweet stands for itself.”
“One day after his own [Office of Management and Budget] director said he would sign it, that he’s now saying he’s thinking about vetoing it, what, does he just want to create more confusion and chaos? I don’t get it.”
— Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.
Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner, Mike DeBonis, Josh Dawsey, Erica Werner, Sean Sullivan and Seung Min Kim of The Washington Post; by Jill Colvin, Catherine Lucey, Lisa Mascaro, Alan Fram, Matthew Daly, Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; and by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear of