Trump in 2018 on $1.3 Trillion Omnibus: ‘I’ll Never Sign Another Bill Like This Again’
From March 23, 2018:
TRANSCRIPT:
THE PRESIDENT: The last time we negotiated something like this — and as you know, it’s always been a problem for our country. They get together and they create a series of documents that nobody has been able to read because it was just done. Now, you tell me who can read that quickly. It takes a long time to read it.
For the last eight years, deep defense cuts have undermined our national security, hallowed our — and they just — if you look at what’s taken out, they’ve hallowed our readiness as a military unit, and put America at really grave risk.
My highest duty is to keep America safe. Nothing more important. The omnibus bill reverses this dangerous defense. As crazy as it’s been, as difficult as it’s been, as much opposition to the military as we’ve had from the Democrats — and it has been tremendous. I try to explain to them, you know, the military is for Republicans and Democrats and everybody else. It’s for everybody. But we have tremendous opposition to creating, really, what will be the far — by far, the strongest military that we’ve ever had. We’ve had that from the Democrats.
So if we take something for the military, they want something for, in many cases, things that are really a wasted sum of money. And it’s not right, and it’s very bad for our country.
We’re looking to do funding for our final fight in certain areas. As you know, we’ve gotten just about a hundred percent of our land back from ISIS. We have troop increases necessary to accomplish what we have to do. And we have, very importantly, a pay increase for our troops. And this will be, actually, the largest pay increase for our incredible people in over a decade. It increases total defense spending by more than $60 billion from last year, and funds the addition of critically needed ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, and submarines. We have submarines being built, the likes of which there’s nothing anywhere in the world like the submarines we build.
Our military equipment is the best equipment in the world. And one of the things you saw two days ago with Saudi Arabia and with other countries — Saudi Arabia, as an example, is buying hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of our equipment. And we’re getting very fast approvals on that.
Therefore, as a matter of national security, I’ve signed this omnibus budget bill. There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced — if we want to build our military — we were forced to have. There are some things that we should have in the bill.
But I say to Congress: I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old. Some people don’t even know what is in — $1.3 trillion — it’s the second largest ever. President Obama signed one that was actually larger, which I’m sure he wasn’t too happy with either.
But, in this case, it became so big because we need to take care of our military, and because the Democrats, who don’t believe in that, added things that they wanted in order to get their votes. We have to get rid of the filibuster rule. We have to get rid of the filibuster rule, and go to 51 votes in the Senate, if we’re going to have really sustained, continued success.
DACA recipients have been treated extremely badly by the Democrats. We wanted to include DACA. We wanted to have them in this bill — 800,000 people. And actually, it could even be more. And we wanted to include DACA in this bill. The Democrats would not do it. They would not do it.
To prevent the omnibus situation from ever happening again, I’m calling on Congress to give me a line-item veto for all government spending bills. And the Senate must end. They must end the filibuster rule and get down to work. We have to get a lot of great legislation approved. And without the filibuster rule, it will happen just like magic.
I want to address the situation on border security, which I call national defense. I call it stopping drugs from pouring across our border. And I call it illegal immigration. It’s all of those things. But national defense is a very important two words. Because by having a strong border system, including a wall, we are in a position, militarily, that is very advantageous.
And before I get off of that subject, I’d like to ask Secretary Mattis to talk about what we’ve accomplished in terms of the military. Because there has never been anything like we’ve been able to do. Our military is very depleted, but it’s rapidly getting better. And in a short period of time, it will be stronger than it has ever been.
So I’d like to ask Secretary Mattis to say a few words, please. Secretary.
