— Published with Permission of ConservativeHQ.com —
Since President Trump threw down the gauntlet to Democratic Party leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Charles Schumer, all we’ve heard from the Republican Party’s Capitol Hill leadership is a deafening silence.
However, grassroots conservatives are not waiting around for the Republican establishment to finally figure out Trump is right about the necessity of building a wall on our southern border.
CHQ has launched our “Don’t Waste The Lame Duck, Build The Wall” campaign aimed at giving spine transplants to squishy Republican legislators, especially in the House where some 40 Republicans are retiring or were defeated in the November midterm election.
The Conservative Action Project, representing hundreds of grassroots conservative leaders and organizations, sent a letter to GOP congressional leaders outlining a three-part program of action to be taken in the year-end funding bill:
Provide a minimum of $5 billion for President Trump’s border wall. Unlike the $1.6 billion that Congress passed in March, these funds must allow the president to actually engage in new construction and planning. To be clear, funds that merely allow for repairs, planning or pedestrian fencing—and do not allow for new construction of President Trump’s wall prototypes—do not constitute funding a border wall.
Provide more funds for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. The U.S. border patrol is facing continued and growing illegal crossings, with over 50,000 apprehensions this fiscal year alone. As current events have demonstrated, adequate funding for both manpower and resources are critical to the safety and security at the border, but also to our national sovereignty. Our legal immigration system, the rule of law, and the nature of U.S. citizenship is at risk if we do not control the flow of illegal immigration by securing the border.
Provide funds for more judges at the border. Under President Obama, the legal threshold for claiming asylum was lowered to one of “credible fear.” As a result, asylum cases have shot upward, many times taking years to process. In the meantime, illegal entrants claiming asylum are released into the interior of the country, where they await legal proceedings for which they may or may not show up. More judges at the border will allow for faster processing times, allowing genuine asylum claims to be identified and prioritized and inadequate asylum claims to be efficiently handled.
Our friends at Americans for Limited Government have also launched http://buildwallnow.org/ and reminded us that after the 2016 election, Congressional Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to map out their agenda, where it was announced by then-incoming House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that Congress with Republican majorities would fund the southern border wall at $12 billion to $15 billion, calling it one of the most important promises the President had made in the campaign.
However, says ALG, since 2016 Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell have moved the goalposts at least four times, always putting off the fight and the vote to some undefined time in the future.
The good news is that the House Freedom Caucus and its leaders Rep. Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan have stepped forward with a plan that will address the border wall funding problem.
The House Freedom Caucus will offer two amendments to the year-end spending bill. First, propose to end the catch and release problem. Second, they propose $5 billion in unrestricted funding for the border wall.
The Meadows – Jordan amendments to the upcoming, must-pass spending bill would:
Fix the loopholes in the law that continue the surge of unaccompanied alien children at the border;
Repeal the Wilberforce trafficking act that would require DHS to treat illegal border crossers from non-contiguous countries the same as those from Mexico and Canada; and
Repeal the Flores Settlement agreement that only allows the feds to detain minors who cross the border illegally for 20 days.
Saying we need to end asylum fraud and the catch and release of illegal border crossers by passing the Meadows – Jordan amendments our friends at NumbersUSA have added the amendment to their action board to rally their millions of supporters behind it. You may reach the NumbersUSA action board through the link.
Meadows and Jordan say House Freedom Caucus members will not vote in support of a bill that doesn’t include these provisions. And they say the president should also use his veto pen to ensure that Congress listens.
Securing the border isn’t going to happen in a Pelosi-run Congress. Republicans still have three weeks. That’s more than enough time for them to do what they said on building the Wall and securing the border.
Please lend your voice to our “Don’t Waste The Lame Duck, Build The Wall” campaign. Click the link and send a letter to Republicans in Congress demanding that the GOP stand with President Trump and fund the wall on our southern border.
