Democrats used their new control over the House of Representatives late Thursday to pass two bills that would reopen parts of the government that have been shut down for two weeks.
But the gesture is unlikely to go anywhere, as the bills don’t include any money for President Trump’s border wall. And that will leave Republicans and Democrats without any clear way forward when they meet Friday morning in the hopes of finding a compromise.
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Trump is set to meet at 11:30 a.m. at the White House with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., along with other congressional leaders.
“We’ll go down there, we’ll talk,” Hoyer said Thursday. “We’ll try to come to an agreement.”
But House Democrats who held a hallway press conference before the vote on the spending bills pledged to stand their ground on the border wall, no matter what Trump wants.
“We are not doing a wall,” Pelosi told reporters. She called a border wall “an immorality,” and “not who we are as a nation.”
Pelosi said the $5 billion Trump is requesting for the wall diverts money from other critical needs, although it is a tiny fraction of all federal spending. Still, she said the wall was a distraction put forward by President Trump who wants to shield his base from the negative impact of his agenda.
“It’s a wall between reality and his constituents, his supporters,” Pelosi said.
Shortly after Christmas, White House officials said they told Democratic leaders they would accept about half of their initial $5 billion request. But when asked about the offer, Pelosi suggested the Trump administration backed away from that idea.
“You can’t have an agreement that people walk away from,” she said. “Go to them and say, ‘Why don’t you stick to what you offered?'”
Given those hardline positions, House passage of bills offering no border wall money at all seemed likely to land with a thud in the Senate and send the partial government shutdown into its third week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday he will not take up the House-passed bills, and Trump has made clear he won’t sign them.
The two bills passed mostly along party lines and would fund several lapsed agencies through Sept. 30 and the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8. Democrats said their legislation would provide more time to work out a deal with Trump over border security, which is typically part of the Homeland Security appropriations bill.
The DHS resolution would give that agency $1.3 billion for border security that could not be used for Trump’s border wall. Only 5 Republicans voted for that resolution, and 7 GOP lawmakers supported the bill funding the other agencies caught up in the shutdown.
The nine agencies affected by the shutdown, which represent about 25 percent of the federal government, have been partially closed since Dec. 22, which has disrupted about 800,000 federal employees.
