Fox News contributor Jedediah Bila said late Wednesday that the partial government shutdown will have been a “waste of time” if President Trump signs a congressional spending bill without $5 billion in funds for a border wall.
“The thing is, this shutdown was completely absurd and a waste of time if it wasn’t going to force him to say, ‘my way or the highway,'” Bila said on Fox News’s “The Five.”
“Either it’s a national emergency or it’s not.”
The comments come as Trump considers the border security agreement a group of bipartisan negotiators came to earlier this week. The deal, among other provisions, includes $1.375 billion for roughly 55 miles of new barriers along the southern border, and roughly $23 billion in total border security funds.
{mosads}Bila condemned the proposal, saying that a lot of Republicans would question the point of the 35-day partial government shutdown if Trump agrees to the parameters in it.
“The deal looks like it stinks,” she said. “It really does. I mean a lot of people on the right are going to be sitting there and saying, what was the whole point of the shutdown?”
“I think people thought, you shut down the government to try to budge the Democrats and if they didn’t budge your next step was going to be declaring a national emergency,” Bila continued.
“He has to learn to stop doing this, he put out there, ‘Mexico was going to pay for the wall.’ Didn’t work out that way. He put out there, ‘I’m not going to budge, I’m going to dig my heels in,'” she added.
“And then when you don’t people are disappointed in you.”
The White House said earlier this week that Trump wasn’t “fully happy” with the deal appropriators struck. However, it appears likely that the president will sign a bill by Friday to avert another shutdown.
Trump said at a rally in El Paso, Texas, earlier this week that his administration would build a wall along the southern border regardless of whether Congress approved funding for it.