President Trump said Monday he rejected a proposal from Sen. Lindsey Graham to temporarily end the ongoing partial government shutdown after many federal workers missed a paycheck Friday.
“That was the suggestion that Lindsey made. But I did reject it, yes. I’m not interested. I want to get it solved. I don’t want to just delay it,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, publicly floated the idea during a Fox News appearance on Sunday. He previously met with Trump on Friday and unsuccessfully urged him to declare a national emergency to build a Mexico border wall without a specific congressional appropriation of funds.
Although Trump initially said he would be “proud” to shut down the government in a bid for border wall funds, he said Monday that Democrats were to blame for the more than three-week shutdown impacting about 800,000 federal workers.
“The Democrats are stopping us, and they are stopping a lot of great people from getting paid. All they have to do is say, ‘We want border security.’ That automatically means a wall or a barrier,” Trump told reporters.
On Friday, Trump announced he would not immediately declare a national emergency in an effort to build the wall, citing a likely court battle. He stood by those remarks on Monday.
“You know how I feel,” Trump said. I’m not looking to call a national emergency. This is so simple, you shouldn’t have to. Now, I have the absolute legal right to call it. But I’m not looking to do that because this is too simple. The Democrats should say, ‘We want border security, we have to build a wall.'”
