Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans had 12-to-15 billion dollars in mind for construction of a southern border wall, as they await a supplemental spending request from the White House to move forward on the project.
“We are moving ahead, as [House speaker Paul Ryan] pointed out to our group yesterday, with roughly 12-to-15 billion dollars. So we intend to address the wall issue ourselves,” McConnell told reporters at a GOP retreat in Philadelphia.
Trump issued an executive order Wednesday directing Homeland Security secretary John Kelly to put together funding plans for a wall, which is authorized under the 2006 Secure Fence Act. “We’re going to wait and see from the administration what their supplemental [request] looks like. I’m not going to get ahead of a policy and a bill that has not been written yet,” Ryan said. “But the point is we are going to finance the Secure Fence Act.”
It remains unclear what budget offsets will come of the plan, how it might affect congressional spending caps, or what role, if any, Mexico will play in footing the bill.
Ryan focused more Thursday on the politics of the Fence Act.
“I think if you take a look at the history of the Secure Fence Act, the last administration frustrated the deployment of the fence. This administration is doing the opposite of it. They’re facilitating the deployment of the fence. We agree with this. We voted for this in 2006, along with plenty of people. Like our friend Chuck Schumer, the minority leader of the Senate, voted for the Secure Fence Act,” Ryan said.
“Now, we’re going to actually deploy this fence. And we will anticipate a supplemental coming from the administration very shortly on how to finish construction and the funding of the fence. And then if there are any other barriers in the way, we will deal with those barriers. But a lot of those barriers we think can be done by executive order through the administration, just like the last administration frustrated the deployment of the wall.”
As amended, the Fence Act mandates at least 700 miles of barrier of some sort along the United States’ southern border with Mexico, and the Homeland Security Department has wide latitude in determining where and what to construct. The initial law was more restrictive, specifying five locations along the border where to build, and requiring that the material comprise double-layered fencing. Many Senate Democrats, including Schumer and six others still in the upper chamber, voted in favor of the original statute. But the changes made to what is now the law were denounced by Republican border hawks, including the Fence Act’s author, Rep. Peter King.
Ironically, those changes might provide the administration greater leeway than was allowed in the original bill in determining what it wants to construct.
