The House of Representatives on Tuesday failed to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a resolution passed in both the House and Senate to end Trump’s immensely stupid plan to declare a national emergency and allocate military funding toward a border wall.
The House voted 248-181 in favor of overriding the veto, missing the required 290-vote supermajority by 42 votes, despite 14 Republican representatives who crossed party lines and voted with the Democrats.
This is the altogether unsurprising end to the legislative effort to stop Trump’s nonexistent national emergency. It also serves as a reminder that despite the Democratic majority in the House, the legislative sway the president has over his party is still enough to basically gridlock Congress for the foreseeable future. Congress can pass all the bills it wants, but it’s going to take a lot more than 14 Republicans voting with the Democrats to get anything done that Trump doesn’t like. Great system we’ve got here! These are checks and balances technically working as intended, to be fair. But, unfortunately, a large section of the House has managed to elect leaders from a party so beholden to the whims of one incredibly dumb sack of bile that they are just fine with raiding border states’ military budgets to finance the president’s vanity project.
Fortunately, the Democrats have a few cards left to play.
Per a statement shortly after the House vote, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Joaquin Castro, one of the House resolution’s authors, are ready to fight for every scrap of that money in the House appropriations and defense authorizations process, which will at least slow down Trump’s attempts to get funding for his wall. Remember how Mexico was going to pay for it? Me neither.