Senate Republicans said Tuesday they agree with President Trump’s insistence that next year’s federal funding include money for a southern border wall but want to avoid government shutdown threats that have plagued Congress for years.
“I support what the president is trying to do on the wall,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. “Most of my members do as well, and we are trying to go through a normal appropriations process that prevents the event at the end of the fiscal year that’s become all too common around here.”
Republicans were meeting in their weekly private luncheon when President Trump tweeted that he wants immigration and border security legislation passed and suggested a shutdown was the only way to get it down.
“I don’t care what the political ramifications are,” Trump tweeted, adding “there is no way Democrats will allow it to be fixed without a government shutdown.”
House and Senate Republicans have been plowing through appropriations measures, some grouped together in “mini-bus” bills, in an effort to pass most fiscal 2019 federal spending legislation by the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year.
The Senate will remain in session throughout most of August in an effort to take up spending legislation that will fund the Defense Department and the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who is leading the effort in the Senate to pass the spending bills as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he takes Trump’s tweeted threat seriously.
Shelby said he also wants to fund the border wall.
But he added, “I find it mind-boggling that anybody would say we’re going to shutdown the government if I don’t get my way.”
The House and Senate have included different amounts of federal funding for a southern border wall. The Senate bill includes the president’s fiscal 2019 request of $1.6 billion. The president now wants to increase the amount.
In the House, lawmakers have budgeted $5 billion for the wall and other border security initiatives.
The money is included in the House and Senate Homeland Security Appropriations bills, which GOP leaders in both chambers said would not be considered until after the November election, in part because of the inevitable partisan fight over wall funding, which Democrats oppose.
That means a short-term resolution would be needed to keep Homeland Security operational after the end of the fiscal year.
Senate and House GOP leaders suggested Trump had agreed with the plan to postpone considering during a White House meeting last week.
But Trump almost immediately began tweeting about shutting down the government over wall funding and immigration reform.
[Trump: Government shutdown a ‘very small price to pay’ for border security]
Trump’s tweets have left the GOP flatfooted.
“I’m not sure there is a plan yet,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, when asked how the GOP plans to try to get the government funded on time. “But we continue to plow through the appropriations bills to get as many as we can get down before the end of the fiscal year.”
The real test will come when Congress sends one of the completed spending bill to Trump desk and the president is faced with signing the measure or letting funding lapse.
“We are going to continue to discuss it with him, and in the process here, we can achieve what he would like to achieve on the wall and also get these appropriations bills signed into law which would be quite different than what has happened in the past,” McConnell said.
Cornyn said Trump’s latest tweets about a government shutdown work to obscure the GOP’s accomplishments, including the progress made on passing spending bills.
“I learned in politics a long time ago it’s possible to step on your own message,” Cornyn said. “Just the variety of different messages have done that here, and to some extent some of the accomplishments we have been able to make with the president, just because of the vast array and variety of messages that just seem to keep on coming,”
