President Trump returned to demanding money from Congress for his border wall on Tuesday night, just a couple of weeks before the issue takes top billing in a showdown over keeping the government funded beyond September.
But as usual, the definition of “wall” seemed variable.
“We have walls. I don’t know if you know: We’re already starting to fix a lot of the walls we already have,” Trump said during his speech in Phoenix. “And we want walls that you can see through, in a sense; you want to see what’s on the other side. But we’re starting to fix a lot of the walls. We’ve done a lot of work.”
It’s evident the president referred to two different types of physical barrier with these remarks, though he described both with the same politically charged word. First, some of the “walls” the government is “already starting to fix” are only shoddy stretches of fence along the southwest border. The May appropriations bill funding such fixes specified that the replacement barrier is to use “previously deployed and operationally effective designs, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs.” Customs and Border Protection defined such a design to THE WEEKLY STANDARD as “20 to 30 feet high utilizing 8-inch diameter, concrete filled steel bollards.” At the time the legislation was passed into law, the administration had not adopted a design for a concrete wall, or a similar see-through structure of the type Trump referenced on Tuesday. Those designs were still in the early stages of a prototyping process, in which CBP would solicit proposals and choose contractors to build examples.
(The White House declined to say if the structures provided for in this legislation were the “walls” to which the president referred. But Congress has not sent any other bill to Trump’s desk containing dollars for a “wall,” however loosely defined.)
As of last week, CBP did not indicate it was close to finishing the process (which you can read more about here). “And until we have a 2018 budget, everything about any new wall construction remains in the planning stages,” a spokesman told me. Right now, just weeks from a must-pass spending bill hitting its deadline, the “wall” is limited to types of “fence” already in use. The rest is hypothetical.
Trump’s pressuring of lawmakers is all the more confusing based on recent comments from administration officials. Stephen Miller answered a reporter’s question in late- July about wall spending simply by warning Democrats not to “block the funding we need to protect our nation from criminals, drug dealers, cartels, and terrorists.” But an official quoted by Politico on Wednesday was particular:
An appropriations measure the House approved before its recess contained money for “bollard fencing,” as well as “bollard levee wall”—but only $38 million marked for “planning” of the presumed “wall.” Allocating money to shore up the border a bit with improved fencing of a non-controversial design shouldn’t be problematic for Democrats on principle, any more than it was in May when nearly all of them in both chambers voted yes on the legislation whose limited border funds Trump touted on Tuesday. If the president can be convinced to pass off similar expenditures as part of his grand plan, then the tension leading up to October could be relaxed. It’d also indicate that Trump is fighting for a wall with bluster more than substance.
