Upon signing a $1.3 trillion Omnibus just hours after threatening to veto it in a tweet, Trump made it clear he wasn’t happy with what he was about to do. He then made a huge demand of Congress: requesting the power of the line-item veto.
The line-item veto is an authority many governors have, which allows them to remove items from budgets they deem to be unnecessary. If Trump were to have a line-item veto power, it would prevent any such future Omnibus bills, because Trump could just cut every single piece of pork from it line by line. And there’s quite a lot of pork in it, as Rand Paul, the only Senator actually reading the Bill, has found.
o $1m for the World Meteorological Organization
o $218m for Promoting Democracy Development in Europe (yep..the birthplace of democracy needs promoting)
o $25m for International Religious Freedom
o $10m for disadvantaged Egyptian Students— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 22, 2018
While filled with pork, the Omnibus bill wasn’t filled with much that Trump’s base supports. For example, it budgeted only $1.6 billion of the estimated $25 billion needed to construct Trump’s central campaign promise, a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
While the border only received a minuscule amount of funding from the Omnibus, Trump did succeed in boosting the military’s budget by $54 billion and theoretically has the option of declaring the construction of a border an issue of national security. In that case, Trump wouldn’t need to get new spending authorized towards the wall, he can simply reallocate funds from the defense budget towards the wall.
According to the Epoch Times:
Trump dropped an eyebrow-raising hint that he could take an unprecedented option and build the wall using the enormous military budget.
“I want to address the situation on border security, which I call national defense,” Trump said. “I call it stopping drugs from pouring across our border. And I call it illegal immigration. It’s all of those things. But national defense is a very important two words. Because by having a strong border system, including a wall, we are in a position, militarily, that is very advantageous.”
For the first time, Trump underlined the significance of the barrier as a military structure and a matter of national defense. Up to now, the president promoted the wall as a way to curtail illegal immigration and stop the deadly flood of illicit drugs. The introduction of the wall’s military function is significant, especially in terms of funding it.
More than half of the spending bill is dedicated to the military for a total of over $654 billion allotted to the Pentagon’s base budget and overseas counterinsurgency operations. That’s enough to build the wall 26 times.
What do you all think? Would this be the perfect way to fund the border in a way that Democrats can never thwart?
