- A question that has come up a lot over the last few weeks is: Why didn't Republicans fund a border wall, or at least a significant increase in physical barriers at the border, when they held both houses of Congress and the White House? I think the answer comes down to four points.
- Third: Throughout 2017 and 2018, Senate Democrats had the power to filibuster wall funding (and while Senate Republicans could have changed the rules to eliminate this power, they did not have 50 senators that wanted to take this step).
- Fourth: When Senate Democrats, in the aftermath of their own failed shutdown last year, proposed such a deal, Trump turned it down because he wanted more, including cuts to legal immigration.
- Second: The Republican congressional leadership didn't really care about the wall, and certainly wasn't going to go to the mat for Trump on the issue when he wasn't asking it to.
- Trump had helped to bring into being a new Republican coalition whose political health depended to a significant degree on progress on the wall, whether or not Trump was exerting himself to deliver that progress.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/border-wall-funding-politics-congress-white-house/
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