Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Funding negotiations again fall short of deal
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Sunday stood by his demands for funding for a border wall as another round of shutdown talks failed to break an impasse, while House Democrats planned to step up the pressure on Trump and Republican lawmakers to reopen the government.
Trump, who spent part of the day at Camp David for staff meetings, showed no signs of budging on his demand for $5.6 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Vice President Mike Pence led a meeting with senior congressional aides at the White House complex, but the discussions yielded little progress.
Seeking to strike an optimistic note as he returned from the presidential retreat in Maryland, Trump said he had told aides to say that they wanted a steel barrier, rather than the concrete wall he promised during the campaign. Trump said Democrats “don’t like concrete, so we’ll give them steel.”
The president has already suggested his definition of the wall is flexible, but Democrats have made clear they see a wall as immoral and ineffective and prefer other types of border security funded at already agreed-upon levels.
With the partial government shutdown in its third week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she intends to begin passing individual bills to reopen agencies in the coming days, starting with the Treasury Department to ensure people receive their tax refunds.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., on Sunday released the text of four bills that would reopen key parts of the government and ensure back pay for federal workers who have been furloughed during the shutdown.
“After we pass these four bills, the Senate should clear them and the President should sign them into law,” Lowey said in a statement.
Although Trump tweeted that the Sunday session had been “productive,” two Democrats familiar with the meeting gave a different take, saying the White House had not provided the budget details they had requested and again declined to reopen the parts of the government that are shut down. One of the officials — neither was authorized to speak publicly — said no additional meetings were scheduled.
Trump said earlier in the day that he was hoping for “some very serious talks come Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.” While insisting he wanted to make a deal, he also declared he would not give an inch in his fight for funding for a border barrier, saying: “There’s not going to be any bend right here.”
The White House maintained its hard line on funding for a border wall Sunday in a two-page letter to congressional leaders, obtained by The Washington Post.
The wall is “central to any strategy,” Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote, asking for funds for “234 miles of new physical barrier.”
Trump advisers said Sunday that the administration wrote the letter after Democratic congressional aides asked Pence for specifics on budget estimates for the Trump administration’s priorities so the negotiations could advance this week.
“During our meetings with congressional staff this weekend, we made it clear that we have a crisis on our southern border, and we outlined the president’s plan to secure our border, build a wall and protect the American people,” Pence said in a brief interview. “It’s time for the Democrats to start negotiating.”
Democrats largely reacted to the letter with a shrug, and several senior aides described the letter as a summary of the weekend meetings rather than a breakthrough. “The Republicans remain boxed in with the wall,” said one aide who was not authorized to speak publicly. “We can’t discuss everything else until the government reopens.”
Senior administration officials described the letter as a flicker of progress, in particular the request for “an additional $800 million to address urgent humanitarian needs” and unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the border, an issue they said Democrats have made a priority during the talks. The officials also said the letter’s formal call for a “steel barrier” rather than a concrete wall was another notable development.
PRESSURE FROM LAWMAKERS
The partial government shutdown dominated the discussions among government officials on Sunday morning talk shows, including lawmakers from both parties.
Among the Republicans expressing concerns was Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should take up bills from the Democratic-led House.
“Let’s get those [agencies] reopened while the negotiations continue,” Collins said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Democrats criticized McConnell for waiting on Trump’s support, but Collins said she was sympathetic to McConnell’s opposition to moving legislation without agreement from the president.
Several Republicans also pushed the Interior Department to find money to restaff national parks amid growing concerns over upkeep and public safety.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested Sunday that pressure would only mount amid the shutdown, which he said is disrupting Transportation Security Administration operations, home loans and farmers in his state.
“Democrats and now a growing number of Republicans are coming together and saying let’s open up the government and debate border security separately,” Schumer told reporters in New York.
Adding to concerns, federal workers might miss this week’s paychecks. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said on NBC’s Meet the Press that if the shutdown continues into Tuesday, “then payroll will not go out as originally planned on Friday night.”
Trump said Sunday that he understood the predicament facing hundreds of thousands of federal workers who might not receive their paychecks.
“I can relate, and I’m sure the people who are on the receiving end will make adjustments; they always do,” Trump said. He claimed that “many of those people agree with what I’m doing.”
A day earlier, the president had tweeted that he didn’t care that “most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats.”
Trump reaffirmed Sunday that he would consider declaring a national emergency to circumvent Congress and spend money as he saw fit. The legality of such a move is unclear, however, and the president would almost certainly face immediate legal challenges in the courts.
“We’re looking at a national emergency because we have a national emergency,” Trump told reporters outside the White House upon returning Sunday evening. Earlier in the day, he said he may act unilaterally to secure wall funding “depending on what happens over the next few days.”
Pelosi, in her first sitdown interview on network television since reclaiming the speaker’s gavel last week, blasted Trump for suggesting that he may unilaterally move to build the border wall.
“The impression you get from the president [is] that he would like to not only close government, build a wall, but also abolish Congress so the only voice that mattered was his own,” Pelosi told Jane Pauley in the interview, which aired on CBS News’ Sunday Morning.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., said on ABC’s This Week that executive power has been used to build military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan but would likely be “wide open” to a court challenge for a border wall. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., called the idea a “nonstarter.”
“Look, if Harry Truman couldn’t nationalize the steel industry during wartime, this president doesn’t have the power to declare an emergency and build a multibillion-dollar wall on the border,” Schiff said.
In his interview on NBC, Mulvaney accused Democrats of stalling in an attempt to win the fight for public opinion. Trump said last month that he would “take the mantle of shutting down” the government over border security.
“I really do firmly believe they think they’re winning the PR battle and they’re willing to drag this out because they think it hurts the president,” Mulvaney said.
Mulvaney sought to frame Trump’s support for a steel barrier as progress in the negotiations, saying that “if he has to give up a concrete wall, replace it with a steel fence in order to do that so that Democrats can say, ‘See? He’s not building a wall anymore,’ that should help us move in the right direction.” Information for this article was contributed by Catherine Lucey, Lisa Mascaro, Julie Walker and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press; by Anna Edney and Mark Niquette of Bloomberg News; and by Robert Costa, Felicia Sonmez, Nick Miroff, Karoun Demirjian, Seung Min Kim and Anne Gearan of