Wall Rider

2ac – not must pass

Not must pass – will be added to spending bills
Elis 7/26 (Niv,7/26/18 “Ryan: Trump willing to be patient on wall funding”, The Hill,
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/399043-ryan-trump-willing-to-be-patient-on-wall-funding)
MJG

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday indicated President Trump is easing up on his
demand for border wall funding in the next major government spending bill , a move that
would lower the odds of a shutdown in October. ”The president’s willing to be patient to make sure that we get what we need so we
can that done,” Ryan said, adding that
funding the wall was "not a question of if, it’s a question of
when." In May, Trump said he was going to “demand” that any stopgap measure to
keep the government operating past Sept. 30 include funds to “secure the border.” The
tweet was widely seen as a threat that he would veto any continuing resolution (CR), prompting a government shutdown, if the
spending measure does not included funding for the border wall. Ryan and McConnell met with Trump at the White House on
Wednesday to discuss their strategy for funding the government. Congress is planning to pass most
appropriations bills in batches and then send them to the president for his signature
ahead of Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year. ‘We think we have a very good
chance of having these appropriations bill done and into law before the fiscal year
deadline," Ryan said. "There will be some bills that don’t pass, that won’t be ready or
done by then, and we’ll need a CR to bridge us over until later on.” One of the goals is to sign the defense spending bill before
Sept. 30, he added. Signing some but not all funding bills into law would result in a more-limited shutdown in the event that a
stopgap measure isn't signed into law. But
the path forward for wall funding remains unclear. The
House Appropriations Committee approved $5 billion in spending for the wall in its
Homeland Security bill on Wednesday, but the Senate’s version of the legislation
contains only $1.6 billion, alongside requirements that funds only be used to reinforce
existing physical barriers. Democrats like Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee, have warned that the House bill is a “nonstarter.” Passing spending bills in the Senate requires the support of at least 60
senators, meaning Republicans will need Democrats on board to advance legislation.

Wont’ get the wall until funding deadline

Waldman 7/26 (Paul, “”Trump’s border wall may soon be dead. It’s another sign of his
weakness.”, July 26th,208, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-
line/wp/2018/07/26/trumps-border-wall-may-soon-be-dead-its-another-sign-of-his-
weakness/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7d9999f575da ) MJG

“I will build a great, great wall on our southern border,” Donald Trump said when he
announced his campaign for president. “And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark
my words.” There was no more important promise he made. Indeed, if you had to sum up in a single idea what distinguished him from his
Republican opponents and made him the GOP nominee, it would be that wall, and the accompanying promise that Mexico would pay for it. Yet you

, there is no wall. Not only that, but there won’t be

may have noticed that a year and a half into his presidency

one anytime soon: Meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and
House Speaker Paul Ryan presented a government spending strategy intended to minimize the threat of a politically debilitating government funding

And Trump seemed receptive, according to lawmakers and aides

lapse over border wall funding.

briefed on the meeting. The Senate majority leader and House speaker laid out to
Trump that they will prioritize less controversial bills before this fall’s Sept. 30 funding
deadline. McConnell (R-Ky.) and Ryan (R-Wis.) hope to fund the majority of the government through the appropriations bill process by the end
of September, and leave a brutal fight over border wall funding until later in the year. Trump made clear to the GOP leaders

that he still wants a $5 billion down payment on his wall this year, but he signaled to
the leaders that he might be willing to wage that fight after the midterms. If you’re a
Trump voter and you’re not feeling like a sucker, I have a “university” offering real
estate secrets you might want to sign up for. What’s going on here is that, yet again, the border wall is becoming a
sticking point as Republicans try to avert a government shutdown. Budget guru Stan Collender puts the odds of a shutdown on Oct. 1 at 60 percent,
specifically because Trump may see this as his last chance to get funding for a wall, which could lead him to veto any stopgap spending bill that doesn’t
include the full $25 billion he’s asking for. Other Republicans, on the other hand, view a shutdown a month before the midterm elections as a disaster,
lest the voters see it as yet more evidence that Republicans are bumbling and reckless and should get the keys to the car taken away for good.
ADVERTISING But underlying all this conflict is the fact that everyone except Trump seems to accept that the wall is terrible policy and terrible politics.
To understand why, think about the money we’re talking about here. While there are practical challenges to building a wall stretching from the Gulf of
Mexico to the Pacific Ocean — in some places the terrain makes it all but impossible, and in others it would require the use of eminent domain to seize

the truth is that the dollar figures aren’t really that high in the scope of a
private property —

federal budget that’s over $4 trillion. Trump used to say that he could do it for $4
billion or $5 billion, which was always silly; last February, a leaked report from the
Department of Homeland Security put the cost at $21.6 billion. Democrats assert that the cost would be
more like $70 billion, and while that’s certainly a lot of money, it’s not as though it’s so much we couldn’t possibly do it if we really wanted to. Heck, the
administration just decided to drop $12 billion on farmers harmed by Trump’s trade war. But Democrats don’t want it, and a lot of Republicans don’t
seem all that eager to get it built, either. Polls have consistently shown that about 60 percent of the public opposes the idea. Yet as far away as it seems
now, the wall was the essence of the Trump campaign. It was an extreme idea that lots of people found offensive, and Trump’s voters loved it. Not only
would it physically embody their opposition to immigration, but also, Trump’s insistence that he’d make Mexico pay for it thrilled them to their cores.
Even many of Trump’s supporters understood it would never happen and was almost entirely a symbolic proposal. It was a reassertion of power, a
display of dominance. Not only would we build a wall that Mexico would hate, but we’d also make them kneel before us. It would be a forced
humiliation. The people Trump was appealing to were those who felt that their rightful place atop society’s hierarchy had been usurped, leaving them
weak. Trump was saying to them: Join me and we’ll take back what’s yours. We’ll stick it to the foreigners and the immigrants and the Muslims and the
feminists and the snooty East Coast professors, anyone who thinks they can come into your country and tell you what to do. Yo u’ll walk tall again. But
who’s weak now? The answer is pretty clear: Trump is weak. His trade war — the other policy he sincerely believed in — is hurting his own voters the
most and may account for poll numbers that are sagging not only nationally but in key states. He was condemned even by many in his own party for

And he can’t persuade his own party to fund his wall. It’s entirely
genuflecting before Vladimir Putin.

possible, perhaps even likely, that they’ll fund the government this year with a token
amount inserted into the spending bill to reinforce some border fencing, then
Democrats will take back the House in November and the border wall will be officially
dead. And four years after he promised it, Trump will return to those same voters and
try to convince them that he kept his word.
 2ac – Non uq
It’s a bill and won’t get past committee – dem chairs block
Elis 7/26 (NIV, “House's $5B border wall bill a non-starter, says top Senate Dem”, The Hill,
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/399022-houses-5b-border-wall-bill-a-non-starter-says-
top-senate-dem) MJG

The $5 billion the House Appropriations Committee allocated to build a wall along the
southern border is a "non-starter," the Senate Appropriations Committee's vice
chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Thursday. "Wasting $5 billion of the American
taxpayer’s money on a cynical, symbolic, and ineffective border wall — a wall the
president has repeatedly promised Mexico would pay for — is a non-starter in the
Senate," Leahy said in a written statement Thursday. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee approved the
Homeland Security spending bill, which included the $5 billion to build 200 miles of a new physical structure along the southern
border. In 2016, Trump campaigned on building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Last week, the president tweeted his
support for the bill when it was first released, personally thanking and endorsing Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), chairman of the House
Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. The
Senate version of the bill includes $1.6 billion
in funding for the wall and limits it to reinforcing existing barriers and “pedestrian
fencing.” Trump vowed not to sign a stop-gap funding measure that lacked funding for
the wall.

4 avenues for border wall legislation that isn’t the plan

Kilgore 18 (Ed Kilgore, 7-2-2018, "Why the GOP Might Face More Humiliation on
Immigration," Daily Intelligencer, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/immigration-
wont-go-away-thanks-to-trump-and-the-base.html) MJG

With the dismal failure of two House Republican immigration bills in the last couple of
weeks (bills that were doomed in the Senate in any event), there’s a sense that the
Great Immigration Debate of 2018 in the GOP is over. After all, a lot of the recent agitation on the issue in the House
was motivated by the desire of two different factions of Republican lawmakers — the
moderates led by Representatives Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of
Florida, and the hard-liners centered in the House Freedom Caucus — to get their
views on record before the November midterms. Everybody got to vote on the hard-core Goodlatte bill and the slightly less
draconian compromise proposal — nicknamed Goodlatte II — so that’s all that had to happen, right? Maybe, but maybe not. There are several future developments that could

) A renewed bipartisan push to vote on Dreamers and more. The

force the issue back into the limelight: (1

latest flurry of failed legislative activity in the House was successful in one limited
respect: it did indeed head off a discharge petition (a rare procedure to bypass committees and the congressional leadership)
that some of the GOP moderates were pushing — with the support of the entire Democratic caucus — that

would have forced votes on a whole spectrum of immigration proposals , with the original DREAM Act
being the most likely survivor of the process. Now that it has led to yet another dead end, it’s possible the discharge petition idea

could come back. If that looks like it could happen, you can expect Paul Ryan and the leadership to shout and scream about the perfidy of giving the godless
Democrats power over the House floor schedule, at the risk of damaging vulnerable members like Denham and Curbelo, who are needed to keep the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s

Ultimately opponents of bipartisan immigration legislation would rely on VERY

hands.

LOUD Trump promises to kill any such abomination should it arrive at his desk. (2) A
renewed uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant families. When the
crisis over family separation at the border blew up in late June, it looked momentarily like Congress would be forced to act to stop the separations — until the president abruptly

the growing realization that kids are

acted with an executive order that at least temporarily reversed his administration’s toxic policies. If

still being detained (just with their parents) revives the big public furor, and/or the
courts strike down Trump’s executive order, the pressure for legislation could ramp
right back up. But it’s not at all clear that any of the necessary parties to a quick legislative fix (House Republicans, Senate Democrats, or Trump) would go along with a
narrow bill instead of insisting on tying it to some broader objective. As Politico reports, Trump might not go along at all: Although top White House officials support such a fix,

a House GOP source

one told POLITICO that he wasn’t sure the president would sign anything without getting concessions from Democrats. Indeed,

said Trump was asking for wall money to be included in any standalone legislation
keeping families together — a nonstarter for many lawmakers. If as some observers suspect, Trump and his top
immigration adviser Stephen Miller exult in border chaos and think the prominence of the immigration issue is a good way to motivate the GOP base heading toward the

The courts
midterms, then the odds of a border fix could go way down. But that would not eliminate the pressure on congressional Republicans to do something. (3)

force a DACA crisis. The family-separation issue isn’t the only one where action in the
federal judiciary could force immigration into the headlines and onto the
congressional agenda. The long-simmering conservative legal challenge to Obama’s
original DACA executive order — which created a protected category for immigrants
who came to the U.S. illegally as children — could reach at least temporary fruition as well, as Rachel Bade explains: A
conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July,

pushing the issue to the fore again. The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated
southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move
to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in. Trump could again
use the peril to Dreamers as leverage to demand his own shifting but politically explosive set of immigration policy goals. And the status of Dreamers as

the most politically attractive subcategory of undocumented immigrants will again put
vulnerable Republicans on the spot. (4) Trump threatens a government shutdown. Even if
Republicans avoid a crisis forced by public opinion or the courts, their own president is perfectly capable of generating one all by himself, and has already threatened to do so.

In March and again in April, the president publicly suggested killing must-pass
appropriations legislation at the end of September (when the omnibus appropriations
measure he grudgingly signed runs out) if he doesn’t get full funding for his border
wall. And it apparently came up again in June during a private meeting on spending plans, as Burgess Everett reported: Trump fumed at senators and his own staff about the
$1.6 billion the Senate is planning to send him this fall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump wants the full $25 billion upfront and doesn’t understand why

…. The president said at

Congress is going to supply him funds in a piecemeal fashion — even though that’s how the spending process typically works

the meeting that if Congress doesn’t give him the resources he needs for border
security, he will shut down the government in September, according to one of the
people familiar with the meeting. He did not give a specific number, but has been fixated on getting the $25 billion in a lump sum. Even if the
Trump threat comes and goes with his moods or negotiating strategy, it could place immigration policy back on the front burner in Washington whether or not other
Republicans want it there. And it’s not just Trump, of course, who has tunnel vision about immigration: Breitbart News, many conservative activists, and a sizable chunk of the
party’s electoral “base” won’t be happy until deportations soar. All in all, the idea that the GOP will be able to bury this issue while leading cheers for tax cuts or the economy, or
pointing at Democrat and yelling about “socialism,” is not a great bet.
 2ac – amendment fails
Any immigration bill with the wall fails – fiated plan means border wall can’t be
attached
Pramuk 6/29 (Jacob, “Immigration reform: More than a decade of failure from Bush to Obama
and now Trump”, CNBC, June 29th 2018, Politics, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/29/congress-
unlikely-to-pass-immigration-reform-border-separation-bill.html) MJG

Congress has tried to codify protections for up to 1.2 million young immigrants
brought to the U.S. illegally as children and aimed to pass increased funding for border
security. Every attempt during the Trump administration — which came after the president tried to end the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy , or DACA, shielding the immigrants known as "Dreamers" — has fallen short. This

week, the Republican bill crashed when GOP members in part could not agree on
whether they wanted to offer a path to citizenship for those young immigrants. The bill
came about after House Republicans negotiated to divert an effort from some members to vote on a wider range of measures. All Democrats

opposed the legislation that failed Wednesday, as it met President Donald Trump's
demands for funding his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and limiting legal
immigration. The House overwhelmingly rejected the GOP’s compromise immigration
bill 6:20 PM ET Wed, 27 June 2018 | 01:04 Meanwhile, multiple proposals failed in the Senate earlier this year. The vast majority of
Democrats and some Republicans rejected a plan that would have codified Trump's
goals. A more moderate compromise between both major parties also failed to pass
the chamber. Lawmakers have not been able to reach any consensus this year, and they may not anytime soon. But the gridlock started long
before the Trump administration. "There’s been a failure in terms of the Democrats when they had control, and a failure on the part of the Republicans,
as well. Both parties should share the blame on that," Hoffman said.
 2ac - No Wall
The wall can’t be built
Garfield 17
Leanna Garfield, Business Insider Reporter, 1-14-2017, "Trump's $25 billion wall would be nearly impossible to build, according to
architects," Business Insider, <span class="skimlinks-unlinked">https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wall-impossible-build-
architects-2017-1</span>, SS

A substantial part of Trump's campaign focused on "the wall" and a deportation-centric, closed immigration policy. But now that he
has won the election, it's still uncertain how anyone will actually build the 1,954-mile-long
border wall. Business Insider consulted a few architects to get some perspective on
this question. They say the project would be nearly impossible (or, at the very least,
unrealistic and a drain on US resources). Here are their reasons. The cost will be huge.
As CityLab points out , Trump is pledging to construct the largest infrastructure project since
the US highway system and the Erie Canal. He has shared few logistic details about
how it will be built, except that Mexico will eventually pay for it (though, Mexican
President Enrique Peña Nieto said his country refuses to foot the estimated $25 billion
construction cost), after the US starts the construction. This giant price tag makes the
project immediately infeasible, Rosa Sheng, a senior architect at the San Francisco-
based firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, tells Business Insider. "The US [is] currently as a
$19-plus trillion deficit. Rather than spending our country's resources on building a wall, we should be focusing our
energy on building bridges — both literal and figurative," she says. This includes "infrastructure improvements and transportation in
major cities that support interstate supply chains, and alternative green energy production that will address not only climate change,
but also challenge our dependency on fossil fuels." us mexico border A boy looks at a fence that is part of a section of the U.S.-
Mexico border wall at Sunland Park, U.S. opposite the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, September 9, 2016. Picture
taken from the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Reuters/Jose Luis Gonzalez Historically, we have seen that building a wall
requires a significant amount of money and time, Sheng adds. The Great Wall of China, for example, resulted in 400,000 deaths of
the soldiers and convicts who built it. "At such a great cost, we have to ask ourselves, 'could we be putting our country's economic
and material resources to better use?'" she says. The
wall challenges the ethics of architecture. William
J. Martin, a freelance architect, says Trump's wall refutes the philosophy of
architecture in and of itself. "Architects design walls, not as barriers, but as a way to
organize space," he tells BI. "Architects include features such as doors and windows
which allow people to move through, and light to illuminate the other side." Members
of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the American Society of Civil
Engineers , which include architects and engineers around the country, are both
bound by codes of ethics , which might conflict with building a border-wall. The codes
include statements like, "Members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors" and "exercise unprejudiced and
unbiased judgment." With the new year, a number of AIA members have left the organization, in response to the letter by the its VP,
Robert Ivy. He said the AIA was "committed to working with President-elect Trump," which resulted in widespread backlash from its
members. us mexico border People hold flags on the Mexican side of the border fence between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, United
States while they take part at the banks of the Rio Bravo in a bi-national Mass in support of migrants and to pray for migrants who
died trying to cross illegally into the U.S, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico November 5, 2016. Reuters/Jose Luis Gonzalez "The [American
Institute of Architects] does not dictate what clients members can accept," Cornelius DuBois, chair of the AIA national ethics
committee, told CityLab. "However, there are a number of points in the Code of Ethics that should encourage [members] to think of
the ethical challenges of accepting a commission or project. And it is by no means certain that an architect would even be involved in
designing such a wall, which is primarily an engineering project." Sheng believes that Trump isn't even serious about building a
physical wall. She understood his frequent mentions of "the wall" as a rhetorical campaign strategy. "Even if we were able to
temporarily suspend the philosophical arguments of what building a wall represents (i.e. if we were to pretend that everyone would
be in favor of doing such a thing), other practical questions arise as well," she says. Building a wall would pose
construction challenges. us mexico border Buildings in Nogales, Mexico (R) are
separated by a border fence from Nogales, Arizona, United Sates, October 9, 2016.
Reuters/Mike Blake The US-Mexico border stretches almost 2,000 miles, and about
650 miles already have vehicle and pedestrian fencing, according to a 2016 report
from the US Government Accountability Office. To build a wall on top of that would be
a redundant use of resources, Sheng says. Building Trump's wall may require about
339 million cubic feet of concrete, or three times what was used to build the Hoover
Dam, according to the IB Times. There are also reasons why certain parts of the border
that don't have fences: they are rocky, uneven, and arid, Mexican architects from
Estudio 3.14 told BI. Added complications of the mountainous areas near the US-
Mexico border mean that the wall would cost even more time and money to build in
these parts. Estudio 3.14's designers estimate the construction would take 16 years,
and made renderings of what the wall, stretching from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of
Mexico, might look like. The architects said that the physical challenges would make
its construction nearly impossible.

Trump can’t build the wall

Waldman 17
Paul Waldman, Communication PhD and politics The Washington Post writer, 4-25-2017, "Sorry, Trump voters, you got scammed.
You're never getting your wall.," chicagotribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-mexico-
border-wall-scam-20170425-story.html, SS

When he ran for president, Donald Trump

made building a wall along the entirety of our southern
border — and making Mexico pay for it — the emotional centerpiece of his campaign.
A bunch of nerds with “facts” and “arguments” might have pointed out all the ways it was nearly impossible, but that was no match
for the visceral thrill Trump’s supporters got when they chanted “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Yet
like so many of
Trump’s promises, it seems to be fading when confronted with the cruel realities of
governing: The White House sought Monday to calm a jittery Washington ahead of a
showdown with Congress over spending, and President Trump softened his demand
that a deal to keep the federal government open include money to begin construction
on his long-promised border wall … I’m sure there are many in Trump’s hard core of supporters who will hold fast
to their faith in the president and tell themselves that their beloved wall will get built eventually. This was the single most important
promise Trump made, the one that distinguished him from his primary opponents, animated his supporters, drew out people who
hadn’t voted in years, and defined the kind of president he was supposed to be and the America he was supposed to create. And
it’s never going to happen. It is simply impossible to overstate the symbolic
importance both the wall and the idea that Mexico would pay for it had in 2016.
Everything about Trump was embodied within it: the xenophobia, the vision of a world of threats and danger, the belief that
complex problems have easy solutions, and most of all, the desire to stand tall and humiliate others, which was so critical to voters
who felt beaten down and humiliated themselves. That’s why the preposterous notion that Mexico would pay for the wall was so
critical: not because we need Mexico’s money, but because forcing Mexicans to pay would be an act of dominance, making them
kneel before us, open up their wallets, and pay us for their own abasement. Whenever a Mexican official would say that of course
they weren’t going to pay for a wall, Trump would tell his crowds, “The wall just got 10 feet higher!” And oh, would they cheer,
thrilled beyond measure at the idea of punishing Mexico for its insolence and showing them who the boss is. Yes, the wall was about
fear and hatred of immigrants, but more than anything it was a vision of empowerment. But just look what Trump has been reduced
to now. Sunday,
he tweeted: “Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early,
Mexico will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall.” Those are the
words of a man who knows that he can’t keep his promise. What accounts for Trump’s
apparent willingness to put off construction of the wall? There’s the immediate need
to keep the government open, and he may have realized that Democrats will not
budge on this issue. He may also have realized that the wall is extremely unpopular,
with polls consistently showing around 60 percent of Americans opposed to it, even if
it remains popular with Trump’s base. Interestingly enough, the wall is more popular the farther you get from
the border itself, which suggests that the people most unsettled by immigration aren’t those whose communities have the most
immigrants, but those whose communities are incorporating significant numbers of immigrants for the first time. And not a single
member of the House or Senate who actually represents a border district or state — a group that includes both Democrats and
Republicans — supports building a wall. Let’s assume for the moment that this budget impasse is going to end without border wall
funding. What happens then? Every time they revisit the issue, the administration and Congress are going to confront the reality
that a wall along the entire 2,000 miles of the border is utterly impractical, even if we were willing to pony up the money it would
cost (estimates range as high as $20 billion). Since much of the border lies on private lands, a wall would require the use of eminent
domain — which Republicans say they despise. Just imagine the news stories as the government seizes land belonging to farmers
and ranchers so it can construct Trump’s vanity project. That’s not to mention the fact that in many sections the border lies in
remote areas, meaning we’d have to spend billions to construct roads in order to get construction equipment to the right places.
And keep in mind that we already have fencing along more than 650 miles of the border, including many of the most high-traffic
areas. Where does that leave the wall? The
most likely outcome over the long term is that Congress
will appropriate some money for new construction, though not nearly the amount a
2,000-mile border would cost. The Department of Homeland Security already has a
plan to build 100 miles of walls in some critical areas. That may well happen, along
with other beefed-up border security efforts. Taken together they’ll make crossing
into the U.S. more difficult — but they won’t be anything like the formidable wall
Trump promised.