White House officials are scrambling to keep the government funded amid contentious immigration talks and disagreements about spending on items from the military to disaster relief.
President Trump wants to see Congress pass a short-term spending bill that averts a government shutdown when funding runs dry at the end of the week, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday.
But Democrats have pushed to attach protections for young, undocumented immigrants to any spending bill, and Republicans remained divided on Wednesday about how to proceed.
“The president certainly doesn’t want a shutdown, and if one happens I think you only have one place to look and that’s to the Democrats, who are holding our military and our national security hostage by trying to push through other policies that have nothing to do with the budget,” Sanders told reporters at the White House.
“We would like to, again, get a budget deal done — a two-year budget deal, a clean budget deal — and then focus on negotiations, following that deal, with finding a permanent solution to DACA and responsible immigration reform,” Sanders added, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “We’ve said that many times before. Our position has not changed.”
White House chief of staff John Kelly and legislative director Marc Short journeyed to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as immigration talks between Democrats and Republicans appeared to stall.
The White House has spent more than a month resisting Democratic efforts to include DACA protections in the spending mix, arguing the issue deserves a separate discussion ahead of the program’s end in March.
Republicans have put forward a short-term spending bill, which the White House has said it backs, that would keep the government open until Feb. 16 and fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years. The continuing resolution — the fourth since Congress missed an initial deadline to pass a budget for the fiscal year — excludes DACA measures, which could keep Democrats from voting for the bill.
A senior congressional aide told the Washington Examiner that the White House is “clearly” pushing members to vote for the continuing resolution.
But the aide said not all House Republicans have aligned with the White House on the need to pass the stopgap spending bill.
“They have some work to do with the Freedom Caucus,” the aide said, referring to the White House.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said enough members of the House Freedom Caucus, which he chairs, opposed the continuing resolution as written Wednesday to prevent Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., from passing it on a party-line vote.
A House Freedom Caucus source said the conservative bloc “generally did not support leadership’s current strategy.”
Freedom Caucus members have pushed leadership to include year-long military funding in the short-term bill.
In the Senate, spending talks have generated less drama so far.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said the Senate will take up the continuing resolution the House passes.
However, McConnell said Wednesday that the Senate would wait for clearer direction from the White House on what kind of immigration bill the president would sign before “spinning our wheels” on a measure that Trump might reject.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on what kind of immigration bill Trump might be unwilling to sign with a potential shutdown on the line.
Republicans and Democrats have already begun to assign blame for a shutdown as the Friday deadline approaches. While the White House and Republicans have said Democrats would be at fault if they withhold their votes from a continuing resolution simply because it excludes a DACA solution, Democrats have insisted Republicans should bear the blame for allowing government funding to lapse because they control both Congress and the White House.
