GOP senator: Pelosi can call the border wall a ‘wangdoodle for all I care’

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could call a border barrier a “wangdoodle” to avoid calling it a “wall” if it helped them make a deal.

“Speaker Pelosi is an extraordinarily bright person. She knows that the walls we have right now are working, she knows that you can’t secure a 1,900-mile border without using barriers. I think she probably doesn’t want to use the word ‘wall.’ That’s ok, she can call it a wangdoodle for all I care,” Kennedy said Thursday on CNN.

Is it a “wall?” Is it a “barrier?” No it’s a “wangdoodle,” says GOP @SenJohnKennedy! #CNN pic.twitter.com/EKajH1ynzK

— Brooke Baldwin (@BrookeBCNN) January 31, 2019

The comment comes as bicameral members of a conference committee are seeking a deal to prevent another government shutdown. Kennedy is not on the committee.

{mosads}Pelosi said Thursday that she would not approve of any spending compromise that included funding for a border wall, but she signaled Democrats would be open to new “infrastructure,” including fencing. 

“Many places on the border there are cliffs, there’s a river, and there are 600 miles of something. Three hundred [miles] of them are Normandy fences,” she said, making a cross with her arms to demonstrate what such fencing looks like. “Three hundred miles of this so that cars cannot go by.” 

“If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall.” 

Trump said during the 35-day government shutdown that the government would not open until he got funding for “a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it. I’ll call it whatever they want.”

However, he doubled down on Thursday, tweeting “A WALL is a WALL!”

Lets just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2019

Kennedy argued that walls are only part of a larger border security solution that would include measures both parties have already endorsed.

“We’re not talking about a wall from one end to the other. Walls are placed strategically along with what the speaker talked about, better technology at ports of entry, more border patrol agents, more detention beds, drones, I mean it’s a combination of things, but it does include a wall, and I know that’s hard for the Speaker to say. Maybe she should call it a wangdoodle.”

The conference committee has until Feb. 15 to reach a deal, after which Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency to obtain the funds necessary to build the border wall.