Some may look at Thursday’s government funding vote by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, and say, “See, I knew he was no conservative.” But they’d be wrong.
The Volunteer State’s senior senator was one of six Republicans to vote for a Democratic measure that would have funded the federal government through Feb. 8 (before an agreement to open the government was reached Friday) but without any money for the Southern border wall that President Donald Trump so desperately wants.
Alexander, who already has announced he will not run for a fourth term in 2020, could feel free to vote his conscience and be the RINO (Republican In Name Only) his opponents think he is. But that’s actually not who he is, and he’d made his position on a partial government shutdown clear – and offered specific solutions on resolving the crisis – earlier this month.
Before he voted for the Democratic measure Thursday, though, he voted for a Republican proposal that would have opened the government and provided $5.7 billion for border protection.
“I voted for President Trump’s proposal to build 234 miles of additional wall along our 1,954 mile Southern border,” Alexander said in a statement. “The president has offered a reasonable compromise, which opens the government and includes relief for ‘dreamers’, disaster relief, and additional funding for improved border security; Democrats are still playing politics. Democrats approved 654 miles of wall on the Southern border for the last four presidents – Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Why is it suddenly ‘immoral’ to build more wall when Trump is president?”
But he said, as he did earlier this month, “Tennesseans elected me to make government work, not to shut it down.”
Earlier in January, Alexander said Trump making a significant deal on immigration could be his Nixon-to-China or Reagan-to-the-Berlin Wall moment. He suggested three options for Congress – going small by giving the president the $1.6 billion he asked for in this year’s budget request and adding $1 billion for border security at ports of entry; going bigger by passing a bill 54 senators voted for 11 months ago that had $25 billion in border security over 10 years and a solution for a group of children, now mostly grown, brought to the country by their illegal immigrant parents; or by going really big by crafting a legal immigration system that secures the border and defines the legal status for all illegal immigrants already here (similar to a bill that 68 senators, including 54 Democrats, supported in 2013).
The senator on Thursday, as he did earlier this month, said shutdowns should be as off-limits to budget negotiations as chemical weapons are to warfare.
We’re glad the president also came to that viewpoint (at least for the three weeks the government will be open) and hope he’ll remember Alexander’s words even beyond that.