Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says President Trump will pull from several pots of money to fulfill his pledge to build a southern border wall, indicating the White House is prepared to accept a deal from Congress that doesn’t fully meet the president’s full $5.7 billion border request.
“We’ll take as much money as you can give us and then we’ll go off and find the money someplace else, legally, in order to secure that southern barrier, but this is going to get built with or without Congress,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“The president is going to build the wall,” he declared.
(…)
Mulvaney noted that presidents have declared 58 national emergencies since the National Emergencies Act was passed in 1976.
“This is not a case, Chris, as many folks think it is of the president just not getting what he wants [and then] so just going off and magically declaring a national emergency and getting all the money he wants,” he told Fox host Chris Wallace. “There are certain things that every president must do in order to trigger the rights that he has to sort of move money around.”
Mulvaney acknowledged, however, that many Republican lawmakers don’t want to see Trump declare a national emergency and that the president himself would prefer to avoid this controversial option.- READ MORE