Yes, the compromise $1.38 million for 55 miles of border wall construction offered by the House and Senate conference committee is an insult to anyone who cares about border security.  Nonetheless, President Trump should take it, let Chuck and Nancy crow and Ann Coulter rail, and then get moving on adding the many other sources of funds available to him to construct hundreds more miles of border barrier at the highest-priority locations identified by the Border Patrol.

Photo credit: Pixnio.

Another partial shutdown of the federal government would do nothing to prod the Democrats into offering more money.  They think they have won and will not budge.

Mick Mulvaney, perhaps the smartest person in Washington, D.C., the man who personally foiled Elizabeth Warren's CFPB with adept bureaucratic maneuvers and has moved on to be the budget director while still heading CFPB, has identified more than enough money available in various unspent pools of money.

"We'll take as much money as you can give us and then we'll go off and find the money someplace else, legally, in order to secure that southern barrier, but this is going to get built with or without Congress," Mulvaney said on "Fox News Sunday."

"The president is going to build the wall," he declared. ...

"Any president can do this," Mulvaney said.  "There are certain funds of money that he can get to without declaring a national emergency and other funds that he can only get to after declaring a national emergency."

The guilty verdict against El Chapo has revived the possibility of acquiring some of the alleged $14 billion in assets he reaped from the drug trade.  Obviously, not all of it is available, but a sum that large inevitably leaves electronic footprints in the global financial system.

Democrats will attempt the usual lawfare approach to tie up this presidential initiative in court.  I hope a brilliant suggestion I saw yesterday, but cannot remember the source of, is followed.  Let a friendly governor of a state in the Fifth Circuit (perhaps Texas) mount a quick lawsuit so the most conservative appeals court in the nation will affirm the president's right to spend the money.

Am I the only person who remembers that President Obama came up with $1.7 billion to send to the mullahs of Iran as part of his JCPOA without a congressional appropriation?  Presidents have amazing executive discretion to spend money without specific authorization from Congress.  I don't recall Chuck and Nancy complaining about that spending without an appropriation.