or better on this particular topic and you ll not get 95% and get a bill passed through the house, through the senate and to the president. i ll give you an example. i voted on three or four different compromises. we couldn t get a single democrat vote for if it had one mile wall in the bill. president trump made it a priority. there s whole sections of wall put in by president obama but we couldn t get a single democrat on that or anything with daca, we lost about 40 or 50 republican votes. and we have to be able to meet somewhere in the middle to make this happen. understood. well, we re hoping for it. i m sure you are, too. and to your credit, you have done your best to meet in the middle, including on the january 6th commission. representative don bacon, retired general in the airs force, thanks for joining the broadcast this morning. thank you, jim. we ll be right back. there s not enough hours to be all that i am.
the democrats don t want to give it to him. the american public knows that. hold on. he is responsible also because he is pitching it so that he can tell the american people, i got a brand-new wall. you know there s no new wall. there s a continuation of the types of fencing and different structures and technologies that they want in different places that they need fixed and added to. there s nothing new. there s no additional. right? it s just more of what we have. $5 billion for nothing new? that becomes a concern. if it shut down hold on. this is not a political argument. just so you understand. i spend a lot of time reporting on this. i m telling you, the idea of what we are told during the campaign, which is right where we see the big barrier fences and sometimes they put some extra kicker to make it tough to get over, that you see a new wall put in front of that, that s not true. those types of structures that we saw they had to put down and they need more, that s wha
just so you understand. i spend a lot of time reporting on this. i m telling you, the idea of what we are told during the campaign, which is right where we see the big barrier fences and sometimes they put some extra kicker to make it tough to get over, that you see a new wall put in front of that, that s not true. those types of structures that we saw they had to put down and they need more, that s what they are talking about. the president sold it as something different during the campaign. he said, mexico is going to pay for it. you say, that was never relevant. of course not. he is responsible for making the wall into something it isn t. the democrats are responsible for fighting the idea overall. i think they are disadvantaged. make your point. you have made the point that the president has moved. because what the president has said is, we will put the money in, as you just described, in places that the border folks believe will be effective. as you said, democrats and
they would be proud to shut the government down is our president. i m confident that leadership, republican and democrat, house and senate, we want to finish our appropriations bills and want to go home. we don t want to see a government shutdown. in a fairly famous exchange as we saw. the president said i m willing to shut the government down over getting my wall. they haven t spent the money that was appropriated. i know you why haven t they? what was it, $1.3 billion? they ve spent money on models and studies but it s not as if they built 100 or 200 miles of wall in the last year. there s a number of problems of the a simple one for folks to understand is that the vast majority of the land on which president trump s imaginative concrete wall would be built is privately owned and a lot of those land owners are not coming forward volunteering to have a wall put at the end of their
last for? was it kind of a little bit more every day? it was a little bit more every day. i think really the first reunion for us was the initial shock was the big one. after that it became normalized fairly rapidly. the next day we had lunch and spent the afternoon together. there was quarters on base where the families were kept. it was on the third day we were taken over there. so it s all programmed out. no matter what the outcome on this court of public opinion on bergdahl is for the family and for him, i hope that they trust in the folks will in san antonio because they know what they are doing and they have their best interest in mind. it helped us tremendously. there was a wall put up around us and we were protected for ten days to get our feet on the ground. what would be your advice to the family going through this? i ve talked to some e people who say take your cues from the