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Trump putting personal ‘win’ before workers

To the editor:

The Jan. 3 editorial, “Democrats won’t deal on the wall,” is as simplistic as Donald Trump’s insistence on fulfilling an uninformed campaign promise.

First, you call $5 billion “pocket change,” as if the money doesn’t matter. The GOP hypocritically styles itself as the party of fiscal responsibility — as long as there is a Democrat in the White House. The tax cuts of 2017 will add $1 trillion to the national debt. The House bill from December added $5.7 billion in spending for the wall with no effort to find spending offsets or new revenue to pay for it.

Then you claim that “Democrats are not willing to spend a dime more if it’s a matter of border security.” Let’s be clear: border security — a policy — is not the same thing as building a wall–one possible strategy toward implementing such policy.

The current-year federal budget includes 10 times more money for border security than the Trump administration has spent. Democrats voted in support of paying for border security, yet Donald Trump left the money on the table.

Democrats’ only motivation, according to the editorial, is to “deny Trump what he wants.” Well, giving the President what he wants is not how the U.S. Constitution defines the role of Congress. It is also the direct opposite of how Congress acted for the last six years of Barack Obama’s Presidency.

Donald Trump wants a “win,” as you point out. But we don’t know what he means by that. He supported the Senate measure that would have avoided a shutdown until Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and others of similar ilk started calling him names like the bullies they are.

Democrats have shown their willingness to fund border security, not the narrow vision of a wall. Too many (but not all, thankfully) Republicans in Congress have shown their willingness to back Donald Trump, perhaps worrying that independent and informed thought on their part will result in losing their next election.

Poll after poll shows the majority of Americans do not favor a wall and do favor some compromise. Trump, however, has demonstrated that 800,000 furloughed workers and a functioning government are less important to him than getting a personal “win.”

Will Thomas

Marshall

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