U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) wants to defund Amtrak to build “the wall.”
Ahead of votes on President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, Blackburn said “the American people should not be forced to foot the bill for Joe Biden’s pet project.”
“If Joe Biden truly cared about infrastructure, he would build the wall at our southern border,” Blackburn said in a statement. “Instead, Biden spent hundreds of millions of dollars to not build a wall and allow illegal aliens to flood into our country.”
Blackburn’s one-page amendment to the infrastructure bill would reallocate $1 billion in Amtrak funding “to construct a wall along the international border between the United States and Mexico.’’
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee sent 300 Tennessee National Guard troops to the Texas border this summer “quelling the most severe border crisis we’ve seen in 20 years.” The move and his visit to the troops in July were done with little evidence any crisis existed on the border.
Instead, Lee and other governors sent troops there at the behest of Texas Governor Greg Abbott who claimed, “open-border policies have led to a humanitarian crisis at our southern border as record levels of illegal immigrants, drugs, and contraband pour into Texas.”
Abbott vowed to build the border wall himself, in the absence of support from Biden. So far, more than $915,000 in donations have been raised on a Texas government website to fund the project.
Blackburn and her Senate colleagues — Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — released a joint statement criticizing Biden’s plan, calling it a “bait and switch” and “the first step in … a liberal wish list.” They say the bill does not show how the infrastructure will be funded.
Here’s the statement:
“We can’t spend money we don’t have. Period. Just look at what is happening with inflation.
We were promised this infrastructure bill was fully paid for, and now we see that it’s not. This was nothing more than a bait and switch.
$205 billion of this bill was to be paid for with re-purposed COVID funds. The latest proposal only shows $50 billion in COVID funds being used, as well as a lot of the proposed ‘pay-fors’ missing.
So, we are asking our colleagues: how is this infrastructure spending bill being paid for? We still don’t know. We still don’t have a score on this legislation from the Congressional Budget Office.
Let’s not forget, this is just the first step in the Democrats’ plan to pass their $5.5 trillion tax and spend liberal wish list. We support infrastructure, but it has to be paid for. This proposal isn’t it.”
