Battle looms in House for wall funds
GOP may face last chance to fulfill Trump’s promise
WASHINGTON — Democrats taking the reins in the U.S. House next year are girding for a fight to block the outgoing Republican majority from granting President Donald Trump the money he wants for a wall along the Mexican border.
After midterm elections positioned Democrats to take control of the House in January, the stakes increased sharply in a year-end spending battle over wall funding for the 2019 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
Unable to strike a deal in September, lawmakers put off until Dec. 7 — after the midterms — a deadline for the next year’s appropriations for the Homeland Security Department and a half-dozen other government agencies.
That has now put money for Trump’s border wall plan squarely in the center of action in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, which starts when lawmakers return to Washington this week. While Republicans see the next month as perhaps their last
chance to make good on Trump’s biggest 2016 campaign promise, Democrats say the midterm election was a repudiation of the president’s tough rhetoric on the border and immigration.
“I’ve served in Congress long enough to know that the Republicans have spoken most loudly about using the lame duck for agendas that have not been confirmed by the American people,” said Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “The turnout in the vote that caused Democrats to win the House is evidence that the message of demonizing immigrants, using the Central American caravan to scare the American people, did not work.”
Once the Democrats take control in January, the GOP’s clout will be significantly reduced in the House, where all spending bills begin. At the same time, some newly empowered Democrats in Texas — which shares more than 1,000 miles of unwalled border with Mexico — will gain sway.
“We don’t want a wall,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. Cuellar, whose district covers the border area south of Laredo, said he has met with Democratic leaders since Tuesday’s election to deliver that message.
“We want security, cameras, sensors, personnel, the Border Patrol,” Cuellar said. “We need to secure the border. Nobody wants an open border. It’s just how we do it.”
Cuellar’s approach to border security — minus a wall — was espoused by some Texas Republicans before Trump’s election in 2016. Among them was current House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul of Austin.
McCaul, who narrowly won reelection last week, eventually came around to supporting Trump’s wall. He was briefly considered for a Cabinet-level position heading Homeland Security. But under Democratic control of the House, McCaul will no longer head the Homeland Security committee or any other.
A spokesman for McCaul said he was not available for comment.
Texas has two Democrats on the committee, which oversees border security: Jackson Lee and Filemon Vela of Brownsville. Both have been outspoken critics of the wall and Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.
But before Democrats take over, they must first fend off a lastgasp effort by the White House to use the current Republican majorities in the House and Senate to secure as much border wall funding as possible.
Both sides recognize that Trump’s push for wall funding will only get steeper after that.
“Certainly, next year it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to pass wall funding,” Cuellar said.
Jackson Lee signaled that Democrats might be expected to hold Trump to his original promises on the wall. “He made it very clear that he would have the funding from Mexico,” she said. “That was his campaign promise, and he really needs to make good on that promise. If he believes Mexico can fund the wall, then that’s where he should seek his funding.”
‘Possible’ shutdown
Trump is seeking $5 billion as a partial down payment on a project that is estimated to cost $25 billion to complete. House Republicans have gone along with that request. But in the Senate, where Democrats have enough votes to block major spending legislation, a pending appropriations bill would provide just $1.6 billion, roughly the same amount that Congress ponied up last year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has floated the idea of upping the ante to $5 billion, but given the GOP’s slim 51-49 current advantage, he would need at least nine Democrats to go along.
Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California pushed during the election season for the full $25 billion, a figure that would be unlikely to get through the Senate this year or next.
Given the political obstacles to wall funding that have frustrated Trump in the first two years of his term, it is unclear how far he is willing to go in what could be his best remaining chance to get Congress to fund the wall.
In a briefing on the midterm results, which also strengthened the GOP’s hold on the Senate, Trump declined to rule out a government shutdown. “I can’t commit to that, but it’s possible,” he said.
While McConnell has cautioned against even a partial shutdown under Republican leadership, Trump made clear that he wants money to build “the whole wall, not pieces of it.”
For the White House, the optics could be problematic. In the runup to the elections, Trump held rallies around the country telling supporters that the wall is already being built — a claim that belies the difficult politics of immigration in Congress.
“We are building a wall in its own way,” Trump said in a preelection interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. “We’re putting up walls and barbed wire, and when you look at what we’re doing, they’re just not coming into our country.”
But Trump has also called the “porous Southern border” a continuing threat to national security, highlighted by the caravan of Central American refugees believed to be headed for the border.
Doubtful DACA deal
Senate Democrats have previously flirted with the idea of giving Trump the full $25 billion he wants in exchange for protections for so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. More than 120,000 are believed to reside in Texas as beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
But a proposed DACA-for-a-wall deal fell apart in the Senate in February, leaving both the question of wall funding and the Dreamers in limbo. With pressure mounting to finish the current year’s spending bills, it is unlikely to be revived now.
“I can’t imagine we’ll do anything other than trying to deal with this funding issue on the wall here at the end of the session,” McConnell said Wednesday.
Democrats, divided over the prospect of trading Dreamers for the wall, also seem little inclined to strike a broader deal, particularly after Trump turned his back on their last offer this year.
“The president’s a very poor negotiator on those issues,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Wednesday. “He sort of backs off, so we’re sort of dubious of the president.”
Any compromise by Schumer would likely get strong pushback from Cuellar and other border-region Democrats in the House.
“They cannot negotiate Dreamers for the wall,” Cuellar said, referring to Schumer and Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. “If they want a wall in the northern part of their area, I’ll be happy to support it in Illinois or New York, but we don’t want a wall down here in Texas.”
At the same time, Republicans have signaled that any Democratic initiatives in the House — including immigration reform, a bipartisan goal for the past two decades — will require compromise with the Republican-led Senate.
“This will be the Democrats’ call,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, when asked about the potential for gridlock in a divided Congress. “If they want to get something done, they’ll need to work with Republicans.”
With the endgame for funding Trump’s wall approaching, activists on both sides are preparing for fireworks. Some note that the negotiations will be complicated by Trump’s decision to send troops to the border to meet the immigrant caravan.
Ginning up partisan passions, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Trump allies in a fundraising email before the election that making California Democrat Nancy Pelosi the next House speaker would threaten “all work that has been done to secure funding for the wall (and) provide resources for border security.”
Immigrant advocates are putting pressure on Democrats not to give in.
Said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition: “To be honest, we’re expecting an ugly fight.”