For two and a half years, Congress and President Trump have battled over funding for his beloved border wall. Trump’s never gotten the kind of dough he’s after, but Congress has never truly bucked the president either. Every budget cycle, the president has been granted new money for his barrier, with much of it headed for Texas. Most Democrats were satisfied: As recently as November, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer viewed $1.6 billion in fencing as a good starting point for negotiations. But with a new spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S. House, Democrats in D.C. seem to have finally tired of messing around.
The new proposal, which passed out of the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, is a multifaceted attack on Trump’s border wall. Rather than the $8.6 billion in new wall funding that the president requested, the measure would provide $0. Going further, the bill would prohibit Trump from building his wall with money not explicitly authorized by Congress, a provision that would stymie his ongoing effort to unilaterally reroute nearly $7 billion from other agencies. In a pointed coup de grâce, the measure would also yank back $601 million that Congress provided in February — the same amount of money Trump is attempting to redirect from a Treasury Department account without congressional approval.
