Chuck Schumer Goes On ‘NBC Sunday’ & Announces Permanent Stop To Border Wall

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With just weeks to go before a new Congress takes its seats, Democrats and Republicans remain locked in a tight battle over government funding. Appearing recently alongside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), President Donald Trump insisted he’d be thrilled to let the government run out of funding if he doesn’t get money for his long sought border wall — and this Sunday on MSNBC’s Meet the Press, Schumer insisted that there’s no path for Trump to get his wall.

He told host Chuck Todd matter-of-factly:

‘President Trump should understand there are not the votes for the wall in the House or the Senate. He is not going to get the wall in any form… We should not let a temper tantrum and threats push us in the direction of something that everybody, even our Republican colleagues, know is wrong… [Trump] shouldn’t use innocent workers as hostage for his temper tantrum to sort of throw a bone to his base.’

Watch below.

Trump has long promised and pushed for a border wall, and although it’s old news at this point, it remains ironic that he went from promising that Mexico would pay for it to repeatedly and incessantly threatening to let the government run out of approved funding if he doesn’t get what he wants for the wall. He’s pressing for $5 billion, while Democrats have only ceded to the possibility of approving just over $1.5 billion for “border security” with the wall excluded.

Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has expressed similar sentiments to those Schumer shared this weekend, dismissing the wall earlier this month as “immoral, ineffective and expensive” around the time Trump signed spending approvals into law keeping the government open through December 21. Trump suggested recently that Pelosi was only taking a tough stance on the wall to win enough votes from her caucus to become the next House Speaker, but it’s not like Schumer has that concern.

Meanwhile, Trump has already made clear that he’s willing to go over the edge for this issue. The government shut down twice earlier this same year, once over a stalemate between the right and left over immigration. Democrats agreed to approve funding for the government that first time only after the GOP promised to pick up the issue of protecting “Dreamers” provided for by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program at a later time. A federal judge eventually threw out the Trump administration’s plans to end DACA, adding it to the trash heap of failed Trump administration efforts.

That’s precisely where the border wall remains for now, too. The GOP doesn’t need Democrats to pass a spending bill including provisions for the border wall in the House — as Pelosi noted to the president’s face recently — but they haven’t even done that.

Trump has even claimed significant portions of the wall have already been built, but that’s just not true. There’s some of the fencing at the border that’s long been there, but that’s it. The administration didn’t even use all of the money allotted for homeland security this past year — and yet they want more. Trump keeps pressing on with his ideology.

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