As the President is keenly aware, the deadline for funding the federal government — after the last time the can was kicked down the road — is on Friday night. And as we noted, Trump is mulling over the option of forgoing his precious wall funding in order to avoid a shutdown.
But Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said what will go down as likely the funniest, most asinine thing any Republican will say during what is sure to be another protracted showdown between the GOP and the Democrats in the funding debate as she answered questions with the press on Wednesday morning outside the White House.
Asked whether or not the President would sign the bill, which according to Congressional sources has just $1.375 billion for “new border fencing” and none allocated to a “border wall,” Sanders waxed almost poetic in her spin:
We want to see what the final piece of legislation looks like. It’s hard to say definitively whether or not the president is going to sign it until we know everything that’s in it. Unlike Nancy Pelosi, we actually like to read legislation before we agree to it. The president isn’t fully happy, as he said yesterday, with everything that’s in the legislation but there are some positive pieces of it. But one way or the other, one thing you can be sure of is at the end of the day the president is going to build the wall. He said he was gonna get it done, and he will.”
Sarah is referring, of course, to the quote that Republicans hounded Pelosi over for years about Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it — away from the fog of the controversy.” But she wasn’t saying she hadn’t read the legislation, she meant that Americans would come to appreciate what was in the law once it was in place. That has easily been proven by the stubborn inability of Republicans to overturn the ACA due to fear of political blowback from their constituents.
In fact, the changes that Americans have demanded to the Affordable Care Act have been based on the fact that they think it didn’t go far enough.
Suggesting that a woman who’s been in Congress since Reagan was President doesn’t read legislation — but a guy who just installed a virtual golf game at the White House so he can have a little break from watching so much TV does read it — might go down as the dumbest thing Sanders has ever said.
Watch the footage here:
Featured image via screen capture
