Thread: Meadows: Many House GOPers Would Encourage Trump to Accept $2.5 Billion for Wall

Meadows: Many House GOPers Would Encourage Trump to Accept $2.5 Billion for Wall

Dec. 27, 2018
Ian Hanchett

(video within tweet)
The Lead CNN

@TheLeadCNN
“Things have not progressed … At this point it looks like we could be in for a very long term shutdown,” Republican @RepMarkMeadows tells @DanaBashCNN on the state of the government shutdown.
1:26 PM - Dec 27, 2018

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-NC) said the “vast majority” of House Republicans understand there might be a compromise on the amount of border wall funding, and “a number of Republican members” would encourage the president to accept a deal offering around $2.5 billion for wall funding.

Meadows said, “Certainly, the vast majority of Republican members of the conference understand that there may be a compromise between 5.7 billion and 1.6, or wherever the number may be. But as we’re looking at it, whether it’s 2.5 or 2.7, it doesn’t matter, Chuck Schumer has said no. The American people see that as a compromise. I see that as a compromise. And so, certainly, if that’s on the table, you would find a number of Republican members encouraging the president to go ahead and accept that.”

https://www.breitbart.com/video/2018...lion-for-wall/

Oh yes, definitely, take it and run. Take whatever they come back with and run with it, this shutdown has gotta go! If they come back with nothing, take it and run. You answer to the higher calling, the common good and get this over with. It should have never happened to begin with.

You don't need to furlough 800,000 federal workers to show the world that the DemoQuacks are Open Borders Scum Bags, because sanctuary cities show that every day, catch and release shows that every day, caravans show it every day, wall jumpers, fence jumpers, tunnel rates, 30 million illegal aliens sucking on $113 billion dollars a year of public taxpayer funded services, the theft of at least 9 million jobs stolen from American workers by illegal aliens shows that every day, these open borders lawsuits show it every day, the murder of that dear police officer today in California and tens of thousands of other Americans killed by illegal aliens show it every day. So you don't need the drama and politics of a government shutdown to get that point across.

So, please end it, you can and I believe will win this war against illegal immigration, in fact, you're already winning it on many fronts, but you will not win it with a government shutdown.

Government shutdowns are losers, every single time they're used. They are brute, they are not finesse, they are raw and unsophisticated. And, tacky. Yes, they're tacky. They are not Trump. You are finesse, sophistication and yes, classy.

Be Trump and End It. Now.

Trump Is Right About the Shutdown

By Deion Kathawa| December 20th, 2018

President Trump once again did something very few thought he would or should do. He hosted a meeting in a camera-filled Oval Office with Vice President Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), during which he brazenly and passionately said:

If we don’t get what we want . . . I will shut down the government, absolutely; and I am proud to shut down the government for border security . . . I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. … I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security.

If the government does partially shut down on Friday, President Trump just handed the Democratic Party a ready-made, 30-second attack ad. Tactically, it seems foolish to have played into their hands the way Trump did. That may be the case. But, as is so often the case with Trump’s tactical “failures,” this one also could end up being a strategic victory.

Regardless, as a nation we need to start thinking more rigorously about government shutdowns, events we have been scaremongered into believing are the end of the republic, if not the whole world.

I submit that we—Republicans, conservatives, those on the political Right—should be happy to shut down the government in service of attaining political must-haves, like control of our porous southern border. Without a strong border, sovereignty is a farce: “A country without borders is not a country at all,” as President Trump is fond of saying.

The U.S. government exists at our sufferance to secure our rights. You can read all about it in the Declaration of Independence. When it fails to do so or actively undermines the will of the sovereign American people, then it deserves to be shut down.

The government “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed” and exists to serve us, not the other way around. It’s really that simple.

If Republicans truly believe their copious rhetoric about federalism and how America is not synonymous with Washington, D.C., then a partial shutdown of the federal government is not “Apocalypse Now.” It’s just a way for We the People to reassert our sovereign prerogative to have a government that looks out for our interests and gives us what we overwhelmingly support: a strong border and sensible immigration system that benefits us as a polity.

When did it become taboo to use a government shutdown as leverage in a legislative negotiation? And when did that result—a shutdown—become the political equivalent of gleefully killing a puppy? Once again, President Trump’s plain-spokenness is shattering congealed illusions and faux norms—constructed over many decades by those who despised the original Constitution bequeathed to us by the Founders. He is saying what everyone knows at a gut level to be true but, for whatever reason, refuses to acknowledge in public as the truth.

Some things merit shutting down the government. Things like a just immigration system that advances America’s interests in our fast-paced, ever-more-dependent-on-technology world.

Even so, when did keeping the federal Leviathan happy, well-fed, purring, and chugging along become a conservativepriority? I must have missed the memo.

As anyone with eyes and a bit of common sense knows, the bureaucracy is dead-set against the GOP as a matter of course and in a manner wholly consistent with its nature; it cannot be otherwise. The administrative state was a progressive creation, and, fundamentally, it serves only its progressive masters’ progressive ends, ratcheting one way—to the left—in perpetuity. Anyone who tries to tame it or even just redirect its energies becomes its sworn enemy, and it reacts savagely when threatened by those even remotely hostile to its power and prestige, let alone its existence.

Lawless as it often is and as alien as it is to the tripartite federal structure of our constitutional republic, it nonetheless remains formally under the president’s control since it is housed in the executive branch, of which the president, per Article II, is the sole head: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” (emphasis added). Not “some” or “most” of that power. Not whatever power career bureaucrats with their own agendas—which are often adverse to the desires of the American people—“allow” him to exercise. And not whatever power happens to accord with the tastes of an intelligentsia which too-often disdains American citizens.

No, the office of the president has all of the executive power. Period.

So, if the American people don’t get what they want—if the country’s immigration policy doesn’t advance the national interest—from a federal government completely controlled by Republicans until January 3, 2019, then why shouldn’t some basically unfireable federal employees with plum jobs feel the heat?

When did “career federal bureaucrat” become a religious position: sacred and untouchable? I must have missed that memo, too.

President Trump was elected in an historic upset in 2016 on the strength of few vital promises. One of those promises was to build a wall to secure our border with Mexico. This really isn’t difficult. Democrats, when they have power, constantly make good on promises to their voters. For example, from 2008 through 2010, they labored unceasingly to overhaul the healthcare system, knowing that the bureaucracy, again, always has their back, and they were punished, cycle after cycle, for their steely resolve. But behold what still lives (at least for now): Obamacare. Republicans need to charge through the fire in like manner.

Sure, they’ll be smeared as “racists” and tarred as “xenophobes” and other such nonsense. But they will have delivered on a big promise. That’s what elections and politics are supposed to accomplish.

But a betrayal of that promise while it easily can be delivered would be a political disaster, a disaster worse than serving up an attack ad on a silver platter to the Democrats by explicitly owning a government shutdown. It would unleash a 2020 backlash that would make the 2010 Tea Party wave elections look like gentle ocean tides. And it would be deserved.

Republicans, Mr. President: We sent you to Washington, D.C. to build the wall, government shutdown be damned. So do it.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/t...-the-shutdown/

President Trump Is Right: Shut It Down

• JED BABBIN

December 17, 2018, 12:05 am

In the face of Democrat recklessness, there’s no other way to bring order to American immigration policy.

The Tuesday showdown between President Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) was not supposed to be a press event but Trump, ever the stage manager, made sure it was. He turned it into a good political scrap.

At the meeting voices were raised, fingers were pointed and — according to the Washington Post — Chuck and Nancy showed that Trump was “malleable” — i.e., unserious — about building the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

But Trump said then that he’s willing to force a showdown in the form of a government shutdown over funding for the wall. He said, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security. I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.”

The Democrats and the media (please pardon the redundancy) treat government shutdowns as something akin to the apocalypse. The Dems always insist that it’s the Republicans’ fault, the media play along, and the Republicans usually don’t say anything that bulls through all the media/Dem manure.

We know — because it’s the law, and because of our experience with them — that government shutdowns don’t put the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard on leave. The Border Patrol and customs agencies aren’t laid off. And TSA doesn’t stop screening airport passengers.

What’s closed down are agencies such as the Energy Department (which doesn’t generate a single kilowatt-hour of electric power), the Education Department (which doesn’t teach anyone anything except how to be a bureaucrat), and the Labor Department (which performs no useful work). These — and hundreds more such agencies — are parts of the government that could be permanently closed without damaging our republic.

And, before we shed a tear about the lost wages of all those government employees, let’s remember that the first thing Congress does when a shutdown ends is pass a special appropriation bill that gives them back pay for the lost time. It’s nothing more than a forced — and paid — vacation.

Government shutdowns are games of political chicken to determine who caves in first, Congress or the White House.

Sometimes they are wasted and produce no useful political product. Such was the January 2018 shutdown over the Obama “Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals” — DACA — program. It lasted three days, the White House caved in, and nothing was accomplished.

On the other hand, government shutdowns that are done at the right time and for the right reason can be highly productive.

Remember the last big shutdown? In 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx) provoked a sixteen-day shutdown with his twenty-one hour filibuster trying to block funding of Obamacare. Cruz and the Republicans were bashed roundly and soundly in the media. The Democrats raised hell about it until the election the following year.

And in the 2014 midterm elections, American voters showed how angry at Republicans they were by giving them control of the Senate for the first time in a decade. They needed six seats to take over. They won eight.

Cruz’s filibuster wasn’t the precipitating cause of the Senate takeover, but it helped. And the 2018 short shutdown wasn’t the cause of the big Dem win in November. In both cases, the results were more a product of presidential unpopularity — and disgust at congressional inaction — than anything else.

Which makes a shutdown over Christmas a very attractive prospect.

The entire Democratic Party is in a very bad place on border security. Their position is the most radical — open borders and no border fence — and is not just at odds with Trump’s base but also with the majority of American voters. If the president, the conservative media, and enough Republicans in the congressional and gubernatorial ranks play it right, they will be big winners, not sinners.

People — at least those who haven’t tuned out politics entirely — are properly disgusted with congressional inaction on immigration and border security. But they have imposed a divided government on us for the next two years, which means that nothing will be done on immigration for at least that time.

But that doesn’t mean the American voters don’t expect something to be done about the problem of people setting a toe in U.S. territory and claiming asylum. They see the flood of illegal immigrants coming over and around the partially-built fence. And, especially in the border states, they are suffering directly from the nearly-unrestricted flow of immigrants into the U.S.

People don’t yet understand that Trump has no other option than a government shutdown so he has to explain it repeatedly. The border wall is the only way to get the immigration mess under some semblance of control, especially since the Dems will block any effort at reforming the immigration and asylum laws for the next two years.

Trump has already been too reasonable and willing to compromise. The cost of the wall will be around $25 billion but Trump is seeking only $5 billion now and has agreed to seek the rest in increments, which means he’ll have this fight again and again. He can’t afford to lose a single round.

The president needs to force the shutdown and bring every gun to bear on the border wall issue.

He can raise hell on Twitter every day the government is shut down but he needs to do more.

The day of the shutdown — it will inevitably be called the “Christmas Shutdown” — should be the day he delivers an Oval Office speech to the American people. He should blame Schumer and Pelosi personally, making them the issue. Neither is popular except in the East and West Coast regions from which they came.

The speech should include many of the names of Americans — such as Kate Steinle, the young woman gunned down by an illegal alien in San Francisco — who have died because the illegal immigration problem hasn’t been solved. And Trump should hammer the Dems about that, just as he did in the 2016 campaign.

After that, he — and as many Republican governors, senators, and congressmen he can corral — should be on television blasting Schumer and Pelosi for closing down the government instead of appropriating the funds to build the wall.

This won’t be a three-day shutdown. It could go on for a month or more. So be it.

https://spectator.org/president-trum...-shut-it-down/

Trump is right on illegal immigration, but he's wrong on the shutdown, no way to win it. Loser from A to Z. He has to stop this now.

EXECUTIVE ORDERS TRUMP

Shut the whole border down
End birthright citizenship
Prosecute Governor's in sanctuary states, get your Attorney General start with Jerry Brown today! Before he leaves office.