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Watch: Democrat Goes Off-Script on Border Wall, Doesn't Make His Party Look Good

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If the Democrat Party has been good at one thing during the government shutdown, it’s staying on message about the border wall: It’s a waste of money.

Apparently, according to Pelosi and Schumer, we’re doing a perfectly good job controlling the border right now. They only want to give up $1.3 billion to border security, and not a bit of it to wall construction.

“If you want to open the government, you must abandon the wall, plain and simple,” Schumer said on the Senate floor in December, according to the Washington Examiner.

Funding for the border wall, Schumer said, “will never pass the Senate. Not today, not next week, not next year.”

And why? Well, during the Oval Office showdown between the president and Democrat congressional leaders, Schumer said that “the experts say you can do border security without a wall, which is wasteful and doesn’t solve the problem.”

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Someone forgot to relay that message to Rep. John Yarmuth.

Yarmouth is a Tennessee Democrat. He’s also the new chairman of the House Budget Committee. He appeared on Hill TV’s “Rising” last week to talk about the shutdown and the border wall. He got off-message.

Very off-message.

First, Yarmuth told host Buck Sexton that, at “one point, Democrats were willing to give $25 billion for border security, just a year ago, in exchange for a deal on DACA.”

Do you think that Trump will get his border wall funding?

This isn’t exactly the whole truth of the deal (as The Associated Press noted during the February negotiations over that plan, “while it would provide the $25 billion Trump wants for his wall, it would dole it out over 10 years and lacks most of the limits Trump is seeking on legal immigration.” Also, what do you think the odds would be that, now that the Democrats have the House, that money would still be doled out?), but never mind.

Yarmuth prattled on about how the wall had changed from concrete to metal slats, which was somehow very important.

“Yeah, but that’s semantics, right? (It’s a) barrier to prevent people from getting through,” Sexton said.

“I think what Democrats object to is that this is not a decision that’s based on any realistic assessment of what is actually security,” Yarmuth said, with some effort.

But at least he was back on message, right? Until Sexton mentioned how he’d had numerous people involved with Border Patrol and border security on and they had all said “unequivocally that a barrier, which would be built piecemeal in places across the border, would help border security.”

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“So why do we keep hearing members of the Democratic Congress come forward saying that it wouldn’t work and it’s stupid, when not only do we have the people who are actually in charge of border security saying it would work and it’s not stupid, we can see that it already does work in places where there is a wall?” Sexton asked.

After an uncomfortable pause, Yarmuth hesitantly said, “That’s exactly right.”

Uh, Rep. Yarmuth? There’s a call on the white courtesy phone for you from Speaker Pelosi.

Rambling aside, and the fact that the answers didn’t exactly come easy to him, we’re not exactly dealing with someone who’s wrong here. He’s just trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance between the official Democrat position — that walls don’t work and aren’t needed — and the fact that everyone with experience on the matter says that they do.

The Democrats’ position is, of course, disingenuous. They know walls do work if actual border security is a real priority or you’re not dealing with external benefits from illegal border crossing that change the calculus.

But that’s not exactly what most conservatives or independents want, particularly since the reason is electorally self-serving. Rep. Yarmuth merely acknowledged the truth.

In the Democrat Party of 2018, unfortunately, that’s a very dangerous thing to do.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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