As we expected, Congress has passed a bill to prevent a partial government shutdown from occurring tomorrow night by funding the government for a period of two weeks.
Crucially, the temporary funding bill does not include any funding for Trump's fantasy border wall and it seems completely implausible that Trump's wall will ever receive funding.
Trump has demanded $5 billion this year as part of his plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico that Democrats argue would be ineffective at keeping out illegal immigrants and illicit drugs.
Instead, Democrats want to continue improving less costly fencing and employing high-tech instruments to detect illegal border crossings. They have agreed to include $1.6 billion for additional border security.
“Let me be clear: the $1.6 billion cannot be used to construct any part of President Trump’s 30-foot-tall concrete border wall. It can only be used for fencing, using technology currently deployed at the border, and only where the experts say fencing is appropriate and makes sense,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday.
Today's bill to fund the government for two weeks passed through the House on a simple voice vote, meaning they didn't even count votes for or against it.
No one is interested in shutting down the government, much less shutting it down over Trump's fantasy border wall.
It's hard to imagine that will change in the next two weeks and, if it doesn't, Trump will never see his wall. Democrats will take control of the House in January and any chance Trump had to procure wall funding while Republicans controlled the entire government will vanish.
For her part, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has made it completely clear that she'll never give Trump funding for a wall.
Most Democrats consider the wall “immoral, ineffective, expensive,” Pelosi said, noting that Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for it, an idea Mexican leaders have repeatedly rejected.
Even if Mexico did pay for the wall, “it’s immoral still,” Pelosi said.