Pelosi and Schumer basically showing Trump their asses right now.
Agreed. Its a solid line nobody can squirm out of.
This is awesome.
Every press conference of the Trump administration:
Press: Look, how is the president going to do this? You haven’t explained …
Press Secretary: Magic beans.
Press: But …
Press Secretary: Look, the president has been very clear about this. Magic beans.
That explanation is simply amazing. Mexico is totally paying for the wall, problem solved! Promise kept! As usual, his supporters will be able to discern no fault in this plan, as their Lord God Trump hath delivered.
I hate to nitpick about that woman regarding her look and specifically makeup, but what on earth is up with her eyebrows? She has like … a roll below her eyebrow. I’m assuming that’s her actual brow line. Are they plucked back to far or is that an eyebrow tatoo or what? What makes it worse is that SHS always has her strange eye looks, so that is compounding the problem.
Her comments are distracting enough without the eyebrow thing.
The thing that his supporters think now, is that Trump is just going to spend the military budget on the wall. They think this is how it works.
But it isn’t how it works.
If this were REALLY how it worked, then that should make you ask the question, “Then why did we give the military that money, given that it wasn’t originally intended to be spent on the wall? What was it supposed to be spent on?”
Now, I realize that most of this forum is like, “It’s all wasted, the military just burns money”, but in actuality the budget is actually allocated to shit. The military gets money for specific things and programs. Which means you can’t just take $50 billion and spend it on a wall… because that means there’s then $50 billion of other shit that won’t get funded.
To put this in perspective, even with the cost overruns of the JSF program, the cost of the wall is nearly 600 F-35’s. SIX HUNDRED. Which do you think would be more useful for our national defense? 600 of the most advanced aircraft in the world, or border defense that’s roughly equivalent, technologically, to defensive strategies from two thousand years ago?
This should be obvious, but of course it isn’t, because it requires you to think about it to some non-zero degree, which Trump supporters never do.
Total capitulation from Trump, at least for now. Can’t wait for him to direct the Joint Chiefs to find the billions needed for the wall in their money. They love shit like that.
That will turn into one of them situations then where hammers cost $2000 each to build the wall. :(
Don’t forget the cost to tear this ridiculous shit down when reason returns to the White House. (NOTE: This assumes anything remotely resembling his Wall is ever built, which is obviously a long shot.)
Haha I audit government contractors. I love how a regular $1 screw suddenly becomes a $50 screw as soon as it’s labeled “military grade”. Do you know how many screws go into a battleship?
This is certainly true, and I think it’s actually illegal for the executive branch to take money allocated for one purpose and spend it on another.
Also, that link you posted from the Press Conference is totally awesome. Just keep repeating that the ‘savings’ (if any) from the trade deal go to private parties, not the government; and that using them to pay for the wall means seizing them from those private parties. And if they’re arguing that greater profitability will lead to higher tax revenues that fund the wall, force them to do the math out loud.
He isn’t actually intent on using that money for the wall. It’s just a lame-ass justification that’s supposed to show Mexico is paying for it, which they aren’t. The only point is to make the stupid thing he said true, which it doesn’t.
So is this why he’s withdrawing from Syria? So he can use the money we spend there on the wall?
Yes, but it’s so lame-ass that there’s a mile-wide hole in it, and journals should keep pointing at the hole.
It can get somewhat fuzzy.
You appropriate money for particular purposes. Often, those purposes are spelled out very specifically: “$X to be used to procure F22 fighter aircraft and their spare parts”. Sometimes they are a little more vague but still specific enough that you can’t use the $ for widely-disparate purposes: “$X to be used for maintenance facilities for F22 aircraft.” It’s certainly illegal to take money that was allocated for, say, F22 maintenance and use it to build a border wall.
But there are appropriations that are fairly vague: “$X to be used for facilities construction and maintenance.” These line-items are kept intentionally fuzzy so that if there are cost over-runs on one project or if there is unexpected flooding damage somewhere else, the agency doesn’t have to go back to Congress to get permission to spend the money.
If Trump were any other POTUS, I would assume that he would be looking around for these unallocated “facilities” buckets to raid for his Wall. But Trump is an infant with zero knowledge of appropriations, so he might actually be thinking about checking all the couches in every federal building for loose change.
Hahaha
It’s like straight out of one of his rallies…he’s fulfilling promises like a mad man!
What do we want? Steel slats!
And who’s going to pay for it? Mexico (indirectly)!
Apparently Trump went into a complete meltdown about the Senate stopgap bill that passed having no wall funding.
His idiot bullshit promise has painted him into a corner.
Gonna be awesome when the government shuts down and even congressional Republicans admit it’s a Trump shutdown.