Top Dems to offer $1.3B for border
House WASHINGTON — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., plan to offer President Donald Trump $1.3 billion for border security this year in a critical meeting today far short of the
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$5 billion Trump wants for his wall.
The late-morning meeting at the White House comes as a Dec. 21 deadline looms when funding will run out for the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies absent action by Congress and Trump.
Those agencies, making up about 25 percent of the federal government, are operating on a short-term spending bill set to expire at the end of next week. Action on longer-term spending bills has been stalled because of the dispute over Trump’s wall.
It will be the first meeting among Trump, Schumer and Pelosi ahead of the shutdown deadline. In recent weeks the two sides have gotten increasingly dug in, and it’s not clear where compromise might lie.
With Republicans about to lose their majority in the House of Representatives, the president and his GOP allies are determined to make one last attempt to get money for the wall Trump promised to build along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump claimed during the campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall but instead now wants U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill.
“The number is $5 billion. If there is a better way to get there than what the president has laid out, then they need to come with an alternative,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said Monday on Fox News Channel. “They can’t come and say they want to shut the government down for no reason because they don’t want border security.”
Democrats have said repeatedly that if there is a partial government shutdown resulting from a funding lapse, Trump will be the one to blame. Pelosi last week called the wall “immoral” and insisted Democrats will not fund it.
House Democrats have been emboldened by their midterm election victories, and some say that even a $1.6 billion deal for the border negotiated on a bipartisan basis in the Senate is too high. Pelosi embraced the slightly smaller $1.3 billion figure last week — a number that would continue funding for the Homeland Security Department and border security at current levels through fiscal 2019.
Pelosi and Schumer have a mixed record meeting with Trump. In September 2017, the pair emerged from a meeting with Trump to announce a big-spending budget deal that blindsided Republicans. But not long after, Pelosi and Schumer emerged from a Chinese-food dinner with Trump to announce an immigration deal that quickly fell apart.
The last time Pelosi and Schumer met with Trump was a year ago, with GOP congressional leaders present.