Hoyer is still onboard the Pelosi train.
Via Fox News:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., acknowledged Wednesday on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” that border walls “obviously” work in some areas, and he rejected suggestions that barriers should be removed where they already exist.
The No. 2 House Democrat additionally asserted that the question of whether to fund President Trump’s proposed border wall — a dispute at the center of the unprecedented partial federal government shutdown — is “not an issue of morality.”
Hoyer’s comments were seemingly at odds with the positions of other House Democrats, who have argued that border walls like the one Trump is proposing are ineffective and immoral.
In an interview last week, for example, Democratic Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar told CNN that “we know walls don’t work, that they don’t stop drugs, that they don’t stop migration.” Escobar also suggested she was open to destroying existing walls, remarking that they are “really ugly” and “monuments to division.”
And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has pledged not to fund Trump’s border wall under any circumstances, said earlier this month that “a wall, in my view, is an immorality” and “the least effective way to protect the border and the most costly.”
But Hoyer, pressed by Baier, distanced himself from those comments.
“Obviously, they work some places,” Hoyer responded, when asked if he favored removing border walls. “But the president wanted to first build a wall apparently 1,954 miles of — and he changed that very substantially. ”
He added: “A wall is — that protects people is not immoral. I think the issue is whether it works. … And the debate ought to be not on morality or racism, I will — I will say that we’re not pleased with some rhetoric that has come about dealing with those — coming across the border, and we think some of the rhetoric was in fact racist. We think some of that rhetoric was to inflame and was not based upon facts.”