Trump takes aim at Pelosi amid stalled shutdown negotiations

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lashed out Sunday at House speaker Nancy Pelosi over stalled negotiations to end the partial government shutdown while rejecting conservative claims that his offer of temporary deportation protections for young immigrants amounts to amnesty.

In a morning tweet, Trump claimed that Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democrats “turned down my offer yesterday before I even got up to speak.”

“They don’t see crime & drugs, they only see 2020 – which they are not going to win. Best economy! They should do the right thing for the Country & allow people to go back to work,” he said.

Trump also argued that Pelosi, whom he had not directly criticized earlier in the shutdown negotiations, has “behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat.”

“She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control ... And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!” Trump said.

Pelosi fired back at Trump on Twitter with a reminder that “800,000 Americans are going without pay.”

“Re-open the government, let workers get their paychecks and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the border,” she said.

The squabbling came as the longest government shutdown in history entered its 30th day with prospects for a quick resolution still slim, troubling news for the 800,000 federal employees who have gone without a paycheck and are resorting to food banks, charity and nongovernment jobs to get by.

As states scramble to mitigate the impact of the shutdown, the bipartisan National Governors Association sent a letter to congressional leaders on Sunday, urging the Senate to immediately pass an extension for the federal welfare program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).

The $16.5 billion block grant program funds cash welfare benefits and other services for low-income families. At least one state is expected to exhaust its funding early next month, the governors’ association said, while the situation in other states varies “based on caseload and enrollment.”

“It is untenable for states to administer effective TANF programs given the current uncertainty,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said in the letter.

On Saturday, Trump had offered Democrats three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. The proposal was immediately rejected by Democrats and derided by conservatives as amnesty.

Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he will move ahead this week on Trump’s proposal. He faces an uphill climb in breaking the Senate’s 60-vote threshold of a filibuster, with Democrats insisting that they will not negotiate on immigration until Trump reopens the government.

Trump sought Sunday to rebut conservative critiques of his latest proposal, maintaining in a tweet that “No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer.”

“It is a 3 year extension of DACA,” Trump said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “Amnesty will be used only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else. Likewise there will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here illegally – but be careful Nancy!”

Trump’s reference to amnesty in the tweet could create confusion and is unlikely to help the president get his plan through Congress.

Asked about Trump’s tweet, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said on ABC’s “This Week” that he wasn’t certain what the president meant. ”What I don’t know is what the president’s talking about there, to say amnesty really involves a much larger group,” Lankford said. “That’s a longer debate and obviously not something we can solve quickly.”

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Vice President Mike Pence reiterated that Trump’s proposal “is not amnesty” because “there’s no pathway to citizenship.”

“There’s no permanent status here at all, which is what amnesty contemplates,” Pence said. But in a separate interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Pence declined to elaborate on whether Trump’s tweet meant that he was leaving the door open to amnesty in the future.

“I’ll let the president’s words stand,” Pence said. He added that Trump is “absolutely determined” to build “234 miles of additional steel barrier” along the U.S.-Mexico border, which the White House outlined in a letter to lawmakers earlier this month.

On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pence also invoked the legacy of the late civil rights leader, noting that he “inspired us to change through the legislative process to become a more perfect union.”

“That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do,” Pence said. “Come to the table in a spirit of good faith. We’ll secure our border, we’ll reopen the government, and we’ll move our nation forward as the president said yesterday to even a broader discussion about immigration reform in the months ahead.”

His comment drew immediate pushback from some Democrats, including Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., who said in a tweet that Trump “is no MLK” and that the vice president owes an apology to the country and King’s memory.

“To equate the legacy of one of America’s finest statesmen and champions of civil rights with a vanity project built on racist ideology and hatred is beyond disgraceful,” Speier said.

Other Democrats on the Sunday morning news shows rallied behind Pelosi and dismissed Trump’s latest proposal.

Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd whether Trump’s offer signals “progress,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said the government must first reopen before any work on border security can commence.

“We cannot reward the kind of behavior of hostage taking,” Warner said on “Meet the Press.” “If the president can arbitrarily shut down the government, he will do it time and time again.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who is pursuing a 2020 presidential bid, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her counter-offer to Trump would be “what we put on the table a year ago and voted for, which was to protect all dreamers.”

Gillibrand held some similar positions to Trump on immigration in 2008, when she said she was a “firm opponent” of giving amnesty to undocumented immigrants and called for English to be the official language of the United States. CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed her on whether those positions – which she now calls Trump “racist” for holding – meant she was racist at the time.

“They certainly weren’t empathetic, and they weren’t kind, and I didn’t think about suffering in people’s lives,” Gillibrand said. “I realized that things I had said were wrong. I was not caring about others. I was not fighting for other people’s kids the same way I was fighting for my own.”

In a White House address Saturday, Trump had proposed a reprieve on his attempts to end the DACA program and temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants from some Latin American and African nations, in exchange for building hundreds of miles of barriers on the southern U.S. border and hiring thousands of new law enforcement agents to be deployed there.

Mitch McConnell announced that he would bring the legislation to the Senate floor for a vote in the coming week. But Pelosi dismissed the proposal Saturday as a “non-starter” and vowed that Democrats would pass their own legislation to reopen the government, putting the onus on the Senate to follow suit.

As the shutdown drags on, the fate of Trump’s State of the Union address remains unclear. Pelosi wrote a letter to Trump last week suggesting he postpone his Jan. 29 speech until the government reopens.

On Sunday, Trump addressed Pelosi in a tweet, saying he is “still thinking about” the speech and that there are “so many options,” including delivering it in person before Congress as originally planned.