Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Why Trump has spared Pelosi from his personal vitriol — so far

The president genuinely respects the incoming speaker, and needs her if he's going to get anything done in the next two years. But the government shutdown is about to test his restraint.

By RACHAEL BADE

01/02/2019 05:04 AM EST

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/02/trump-pelosi-relationship-government-shutdown-1077193

The unspent money also caught my eye. Trump lies about that too

How much has been spent so far on Donald Trump's border wall?

By Matthew Gold, Louis Jacobson, Joseph Kennedy, Anderson Small on Thursday, November 29th, 2018 at 2:48 p.m.

[...]

Trump gets to his $3.2 billion total by factoring in an additional $1.6 billion, which appears to stem from funding included in a pending Senate bill. But that bill hasn’t been passed by the Senate yet, much less approved by the House and signed by the president, so it’s premature to count that as solid funding.

So, right off the bat, the $3.2 billion figure Trump cited is twice as high as has actually been approved for the wall.

It’s also not going toward Trump’s vision.

Is it being spent on a Trump-style border wall?

Here’s how the government is authorized to spend the $1.6 billion package that Congress approved last spring.

The spending bill said the designated funds "shall only be available for operationally effective designs deployed as of the date of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017" (which was May 5, 2017). The bill mentioned steel bollards as an example. (See some of the specific uses.)

Trump shared photos back in a March tweet that touted "the start of our southern border WALL." According to Los Angeles Times reporting, the photos were for the replacement of an estimated 2.25-mile border wall in Calexico, Calif., built in the 1990s using recycled scraps of metal and old landing mat. That barrier is being replaced with a 30-foot high bollard-style wall. Plans for that replacement began in 2009, the newspaper reported.

The newspaper quoted Jonathan Pacheco, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, as having said earlier in March: "First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area."
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/nov/29/how-much-has-been-spent-so-far-donald-trumps-borde/