President Trump is heading to Camp David where talks will take place with senior White House staff on border security as the partial government shutdown moves into its third week.
The deadlock over border security funding appears to have no end in sight, even as the Trump administration claims it is making concessions to Democrats to lock in Trump’s demand for $5.6 billion in funding for a border wall.
Meanwhile Democrats, not willing to give more than $1.3 billion in annual border funding, blame Trump for the shutdown. In the House, where they have a new majority, they passed a spending bill that would re-open the government but not provide any funding for a wall. The GOP-led Senate has signaled it will not take up any legislation opposed by Trump.
Leaving for the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland, Trump told reporters Sunday that he has the support of most government workers who are impacted by the shutdown.
They “agree 100 percent with what I’m doing,” he said before repeating his claim that he may resort to declaring a national emergency to get his border wall — a move that is certain to result in a legal fight.
“This shutdown could end tomorrow or it also could go on for a long time,” Trump added.
Vice President Mike Pence and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney met with Democratic aides on Saturday to work toward ending the impasse, but both sides have indicated that no progress was made.
“V.P. Mike Pence and team just left the White House,” Trump tweeted. “Briefed me on their meeting with the Schumer/Pelosi representatives. Not much headway made today. Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”
The two sides discussed a multitude of topics, including protections for so-called Dreamers currently protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and asylum policies, but little was agreed upon, GOP and Democratic aides told Politico.
In another show of compromise, Mulvaney told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump has let go of his call for a “concrete wall” and has shifted to a steel fence. “If he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, ‘See? He’s not building a wall anymore,’ that should help us move in the right direction,” Mulvaney said.
“If that’s not evidence of the president’s desire to try and resolve this, I don’t know what is,” Mulvaney said.
But Democrats were never willing to compromise, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a separate interview Sunday. “The first thing that one of the individuals from the Democrats’ side said in the meeting was ‘We’re not here to make an agreement,” Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday.”
New House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., met with Trump and other leaders on Friday, and said afterwards that her impression was that Trump relishes a government shutdown.
“Our purpose in the meeting at the White House was to open up government. The impression you get from the president that he would like to not only close government, build a wall, but also abolish Congress so the only voice that mattered was his own,” she told “CBS Sunday Morning.”
The next move Democrats are making is to offer a series of bills, introduced by House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., that give funding to specific departments, the first of which would fund the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service.
Approximately 800,000 of approximately 2.1 million federal workers have been furloughed or are being required to work without pay during the partial shutdown.
