Trump, congressional leaders set to meet as shutdown looms

WASHINGTON —President Donald Trump and top congressional leaders are set to meet Thursday to discuss enacting a year-end spending agreement in hopes of averting a government shutdown.

With a spending deadline set for Friday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Monday that they accepted Trump’s invitation to meet at the White House with top Republican leaders the night before government funding dries up.

The meeting date puts significant pressure on GOP leaders to shore up support in their own ranks ahead of a vote on a plan to keep the government operating two more weeks as talks continue.

“We’re glad the White House has reached out and asked for a second meeting. We hope the President will go into this meeting with an open mind, rather than deciding that an agreement can’t be reached beforehand,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a statement.

Over the weekend, Republican leaders unveiled a stopgap spending plan that would keep the government open through Dec. 22, but it is unclear whether there’s enough support among House Republicans to pass the spending plan on a party-line vote. Democrats are pressuring Republicans to resolve the legal status of immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children.

But in a sign of trouble, members of the House Freedom Caucus on Monday night briefly withheld support for a bill to formally launch negotiations with the Senate on a GOP tax reform plan as a way to extract concessions from Republican leaders on the spending measure. Freedom Caucus leaders said that House GOP leaders had agreed to keep talking about possibly setting the next deadline for Dec. 30.