Trump won’t tell GOP what deal he’ll take
President delays vacation, does little negotiating
The partial government shutdown that began early Saturday will continue for the next several days, as Sen. Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., the majority leader, adjourned the Senate until Thursday and the White House indicated that President Donald Trump was sticking to his demand for $5 billion for a border wall.
In a call with reporters, administration officials indicated that the president would not relent on his signature campaign promise, saying that the only way out of the impasse was for Senate Democrats to do something they have promised never to do — grant him the $5 billion for border security.
But even as the White House officials spoke, Vice President Mike Pence was at the Capitol presenting an offer to the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, according to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-ala., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He offered no details about the proposal, and said it would be difficult to reach any deal Saturday.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the top House Democrat, suggested in an interview that if an agreement was not struck by the close of the weekend, lawmakers and staff members in her chamber should also go home for the Christmas holiday. “I really do think that if it doesn’t happen today or tomorrow, then people should just be with their families and relax,” she said, adding, “We have certainty we will end this the first week in January,” when Democrats assume control of the House.
Large sections of the federal government closed at 12:01 a.m. Saturday in the third shutdown of Trump’s 23 months in office. It was an ignominious end to a year that began much the same way, with a three-day government shutdown in January.
The latest breakdown, which hinges almost entirely on the impulses of a mercurial president, only added to the sense that, as Sen. Claire Mccaskill, D-MO., who is departing, said in her recent farewell speech, “something is broken, and if we don’t have the strength to look in the mirror and fix it, the American people are going to grow more and more cynical.”
With Senate Democrats saying they will never accede to Trump’s insistence on the $5 billion for his wall, and the White House offering no indication that the president will accept less, nine of the federal government’s 15 Cabinetlevel departments have officially shuttered. They include the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security and the Interior; other agencies, like the Defense Department, are unaffected because Congress had already approved their spending.
Roughly 380,000 workers were expected to be sent home, and another 420,000 considered too essential to be furloughed — including airport security officials and Customs and Border Protection officers — were to remain on the job without pay. National parks generally planned to remain open, though with reduced services in some cases and without the presence of rangers to assist visitors.
The shutdown’s effects will become more pronounced Wednesday, when workers had been scheduled to return after the holiday.
After remaining publicly silent on the shutdown through much of Saturday morning, Trump took to Twitter a little before noon. “I am in the White House, working hard,” tweeted the president, who canceled his Florida holiday getaway to his club Mar-a-lago due to the shutdown. First lady Melania Trump was flying back to Washington to be with her husband.
“We are negotiating with the Democrats on desperately needed Border Security (Gangs, Drugs, Human Trafficking & more) but it could be a long stay,” he wrote, not specifically mentioning his much-promised wall.
The president delayed his planned 16-day vacation to Mar-a-lago, his Florida resort, where he had intended to interview a host of possible candidates for Cabinet secretary
positions.
While administration officials were negotiating with Senate Democrats, Trump hosted a Republicans-only lunch at the White House; the guests included Shelby and several leaders of the House Freedom Caucus, die-hard Trump supporters who have been leading the push for wall funding and encouraging the president to demand it.
In the Capitol, the Senate was officially in session until Saturday afternoon. The two Senate leaders — Mcconnell and Schumer — gave dueling speeches on the Senate floor, with Mcconnell pointing the finger at Democrats and Schumer pointing the finger at Trump.
“They brought this about because they’re under a lot of pressure — we all know this — from their far left and feel compelled to disagree with the president,” Mcconnell said, referring to Democrats. He said Republicans have “pushed the pause button until the president, from whom we will need a signature, and Senate Democrats, from whom we will need votes, reach agreement.”
Schumer said the shutdown had occurred “because of one person and one person alone — President Trump. We arrived at this moment because the president has been on a destructive two-week temper tantrum demanding the American taxpayer pony up for an expensive, ineffective border wall that the president promised Mexico would pay for.”
Saturday’s negotiations followed a tumultuous week in the Capitol. On Thursday, the Republicanled House, voting mostly along party lines, passed a stopgap spending measure to fund the nine agencies, and attached $5.7 billion to it for border security and disaster relief.
The Senate on Friday voted 48-47, with Pence breaking a tie, to begin debate on that legislation. But leaders of both parties agreed the vote was largely meaningless and that the House bill had no chance of passing the Senate, because Republicans could not get help from Democrats to muster the 60 votes required under Senate rules. That sent White House and congressional officials back to the negotiating table.
With Trump publicly sticking to his demand of $5 billion for a wall — or, as he said on Twitter on Friday, “artistically designed steel slats” — there were a number of potential compromises that would have forced him to drop it, by perhaps leaving out spending on a wall while instead beefing up spending on other security measures at the border, according to people with knowledge of the talks.
Among the options discussed behind closed doors were proposals that would allocate anywhere from $1.6 billion to $2.5 billion to border security, none of which could be spent on a wall. But it was not clear that conservatives in the House, who insisted Thursday on adding the $5.7 billion for the barrier, would back that solution.
Lawmakers were exasperated and eager to head home for the Christmas holiday. Some held out hope early Saturday that Democrats would meet the White House halfway on Trump’s $5 billion demand. Democrats in the Senate have offered, at various points, $1.3 billion or $1.6 billion for border security, including fencing — but not a wall.
The effects of the shutdown will spread with time, particularly once the workweek begins. The Smithsonian Institution said it had enough money that its museums, as well as the National Zoo in Washington, could remain open through Jan. 1.
Even agencies that remained open, though, said they may need to curb their operations. The National Weather Service office in Tallahassee, Fla., for example, said it would still issue its usual predictions and alerts, but that it would limit social media posts “to subjects that are directly related to forecasts and warnings.”
In Windsor Locks, Conn., a Transportation Security Administration agent stacked plastic bins at Bradley International Airport late Friday. The agent, Daniel Defosse, said he wasn’t too upset that he would be working without pay. “It’s a job. It comes with the territory, honestly,” he said. Still, he added, “it’s not going to be fun, but we’ve got to do it.”
At the same time, in Washington, the blame game was under way. With Democrats set to take over the House in January, their leaders wasted little time in reminding the nation that Republicans are, for now at least, still running the show.
“Regrettably, America has now entered a Trump Shutdown,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement late Friday.
“Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House,” the statement said. “But instead of honoring his responsibility to the American people, President Trump threw a temper tantrum and convinced House Republicans to push our nation into a destructive Trump Shutdown.”
The use of that phrase — Trump Shutdown — was a calculated effort by the Democrats to force Trump to take blame. In his muchpublicized meeting with Schumer and Pelosi in the Oval Office earlier this month, the president said he would do just that, declaring, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security.” He added, “I am not going to blame you for it.”
But as Friday’s midnight deadline drew near, Trump had reversed himself and was using the phrase “Democrat shutdown” to describe the latest turn of events.
“If enough Dems don’t vote, it will be a Democrat Shutdown!” Trump declared on Twitter on Friday, right before the Senate took its vote.
But Trump himself was complicating the chances of any deal; during a meeting with Republican senators on Friday morning, he refused to provide specifics about what kind of plan he could support, including how much money he would accept for fortifying the border, despite their repeated efforts to ascertain his conditions for a deal, according to a Senate official briefed on the session who insisted on anonymity to describe it.
Democrats, meanwhile, felt they had the upper hand, given the Republican majority in the House will expire in two weeks.
“Abandon your shutdown strategy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Friday, addressing his remarks to the president. “You’re not getting the wall today, next week or on Jan. 3 when Democrats take control of the House.”
Meanwhile, one nemesis of the president — celebrity chef Jose Andres, who backed out of a deal to open a restaurant in the Trump hotel in Washington after Trump made derogatory remarks about Mexicans — delighted in tweaking the president.
“All my beautiful hardworking people of the Federal Goverment, come to any of my places with your families at the bar between 2-5 pm for a free sandwich,” Andres wrote on Twitter. “Everyday until back to work!”