Banging his head against the wall: Trump still won’t get his billions – Washington Examiner

As the Senate prepares to join the House in rebuking President Trump’s emergency declaration to seize money to build his wall, the president hasn’t quite got the message that Congress isn’t on board with pouring billions of dollars into barriers at the southern border.

Nevertheless, Trump is ready to try again with his well-worn strategy of simply demanding money. Indeed, on Monday, the White House submitted the administration’s 2020 budget proposal to Congress, which includes an $8.6 billion ask for a border wall funding.

For a bit of comparison, that $8.6 billion contained in the new budget proposal is more than Trump was hoping to get even when both chambers of Congress were controlled by Republicans. Indeed, the wall funding fight that shutdown the government in December, before the House flipped to Democrats, was over $5.7 billion.

It’s also more than the current split Congress was willing to give him earlier this year ($1.375 billion) and more than he’s currently able to get through his controversial emergency declaration ( up to $8 billion).

Perhaps Trump is betting that lawmakers have changed their minds, or that this time they will cave to presidential wishes. Either way, those are bets he’s bound to lose. More demands aren’t going to make much headway in convincing Congress to increase funding for border security.

If Trump is serious about border security and thinks that more wall is the best way to do it, he’d do well to start with the $1.375 billion already allocated and makes his case on the success of the new sections he builds. Or if he is desperate to have the funding now, he’d find a new, less sure-to-fail way to ask for it — perhaps by first working with Congress to reach an agreement on what amount of funding might be possible.