Fox News panelist Lisa Kennedy Montgomery called out President Donald Trump for his suggestion that he’d circumvent Congress to build his promised southern border wall, saying people would be “up in arms” if the Obama administration tried the same thing.
Appearing on the show “Outnumbered,” the Fox Business host, who goes by the name Kennedy, was on a panel discussing Trump’s ongoing battle to fund his wall. The president has threatened a government shutdown unless lawmakers approve $5 billion in wall funding, and has tweeted that the U.S. military will build the wall. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there are “other ways” to secure the $5 billion Trump is seeking.
Going against her fellow panelists, Kennedy said she found herself in the rare position of agreeing with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who opposes wall funding.
“That’s not the way the government works,” Kennedy said. “You can’t just take $1 billion from this program, $1 billion from over here, and then put it toward your pet project. If this were the Obama administration and President Obama had done that with Solyndra, and taken money from the defense budget for a solar panel company, we would all be up in arms.”
(Solyndra, which benefited from the government’s 2009 economic stimulus before going bankrupt, was a favorite conservative talking point during the Obama years.)
Kennedy went on to say that the Trump administration’s proposed wall workaround is “really not OK” and “not how the government should function.”
“If the president wasn’t able to get this funding when he had both chambers, it just goes to show what a politically toxic issue this is,” she said.