President Trump is actively engaged in trying to end the government shutdown, even though he didn’t spend much time talking to congressional Democrats Saturday during the first day of the shutdown, White House legislative director Marc Short said Sunday.
Short said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday Trump spent time talking to congressional Republicans and Cabinet secretaries on Saturday.
“He’s on the phone trying to find a resolution to it and he had members over to the White House a week ago in a bipartisan bicameral fashion to get past this impasse,” Short said.
Short sounded conciliatory toward Democrats during the interview when he was talking about the White House’s desire to get a deal done to end the shutdown.
He said the White House wants to solve the immigration debate kicked into high gear by Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program allowed the children of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors to stay in the country and gave them the ability to work.
That program is set to end March 5, and Short said it’s a high priority for the White House to get a deal in Congress to protect those people.
“We want to solve DACA. We recognize these are people aged between 16 and 36 who have work permits,” Short said. “They wouldn’t get the work permits unless they had a clean work record and they’re productive to society. We want to solve that and not on a different page of that.”
Short said he believes negotiations between the White House and Congress are progressing, even though Saturday seemed like a day of lawmakers spinning their wheels.
“We narrowed down the broader debate to a smaller one. We feel like we’re making progress on the overall discussion and we think we’ll get to a solution,” he said. “What befuddles us is to say we’re not going to pay millions of our troops serving around the world or the border agents until what? [Democrats] don’t know what it is [they’re] asking for.”
He added, “When you look back over the last year and you see record tax relief, you see a Supreme Court justice confirmed and more justices confirmed at the circuit court level than any year in the American history, repeal of the individual mandate and all the things the administration has done and [Democrats] are being held captive by a base in their party that’s angry and they are responding to that base. This is not about policy … it’s purely about politics.”
