WHITE HOUSE TRYING TO HOLD THE LINE ON SHUTDOWN.
White House tries to hold jittery GOP in line on shutdown
The White House is trying to hold jittery congressional Republicans in line on the 19th day of the partial government shutdown, with no end in sight to the impasse over President Donald Trump’s demand for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s growing concern about the toll the shutdown is taking on everyday Americans, including disruptions in payments to farmers and trouble for home buyers who are seeking governmentbacked mortgage loans - “serious stuff,” according to Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, urged colleagues to approve spending bills that would reopen various agencies, “so that whether it’s the Department of the Interior or it is the IRS, those folks can get back to work. I’d like to see that.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called the standoff “completely unnecessary and contrived. People expect their government to work . ... This obviously is not working.”
Trump was to get a personal sense of the concern -and perhaps questions about his strategy - from those in his own party at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. Republicans
Like other Republicans, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said she wants border security. But she said there was “no way” the shutdown fight would drag on for years as Trump warned last week.
“I think certainly I have expressed more than a few times the frustrations with a government shutdown and how useless it is,” Capito said Tuesday. “That pressure is going to build.” There was no sign Trump was backing down from his demand for $5.7 billion for the border wall in exchange for ending the shutdown.
Late in the day, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders were to return to the White House to meet with him and renew negotiations that have shown no apparent progress in the past week.
Tuesday night, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the first time, Trump argued that the wall was needed to resolve a security and humanitarian “crisis.” He blamed illegal immigration for what he said was a scourge of drugs and violence in the U.S. and asked: “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”
Democrats in response accused Trump appealing to “fear, not facts” and manufacturing a border crisis for political gain. The White House was trying to shore up GOP support even before Trump spoke. At a private meeting with House Republicans, Vice-President Mike Pence cited a C.S. Lewis quote calling courage a virtue, and he said Trump has no plans to retreat.
“That pickup ain’t got reverse in it,” Pence said, according to people familiar with the conversation.