Trump digs in as government shutdown nears

WASHINGTON — Racing toward a partial government shutdown, President Donald Trump’s top envoys were dispatched to Capitol Hill as he dug in Friday in a standoff over his demand for billions of dollars in U.S.-Mexico border wall money.

Vice-President Mike Pence, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and senior adviser Jared Kushner arrived in late afternoon for a round of office calls, but there was no clear movement toward a deal with Democrats or Republicans to end the crisis.

The shutdown, scheduled for midnight, would disrupt government operations and leave hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed or forced to work without pay just days before Christmas.

At a White House bill signing, Trump said the government is “totally prepared for a very long shutdown.”

Trump tried to pin the blame on Democrats for the possible shutdown, even though just last week he said he would be “proud” to shut part of the government in a fight for the wall, which was a major promise of his presidential campaign.

“This is our only chance that we’ll ever have, in our opinion, because of the world and the way it breaks out, to get great border security,” Trump said Friday at the White House. Democrats will take control of the House in January, and they oppose major funding for wall construction.

Trump convened Republican senators for a lengthy meeting at the White House, but the lengthy back-andforth with the president did not appear to set a strategy for moving forward. A person granted anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss the private session said the president would not get behind lower levels of funding the senators discussed.

“I was in an hour meeting on that and there was no conclusion,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell returned to Capitol Hill saying lawmakers “had a good conversation about the way forward.”

McConnell quickly set in motion a Senate procedural vote on a House Republican package that would give Trump $5.7 billion for the wall, but it was not expected to pass. At least one Republican, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, was opposed, saying he would resist wall money without broader immigration reforms, leaving even the procedural vote in doubt.

To underscore the difficulty, the Senate vote was stuck in a long holding pattern waiting for the return of senators who had already left town.

Senators were being recalled to Washington after having already approved a bipartisan package earlier this week that would continue existing border security funding, at $1.3 billion, but without new money for Trump’s wall.

Amid the impasse, Pence and the others were dispatched to the Capitol to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who told them that Trump’s demands for wall money would not pass the Senate, according to the senator’s spokesman.

Schumer told Pence, Mulvaney and Kushner other offers to keep the government running with existing levels of border security funds remain on the table.