Parties remain dug in as shutdown votes loom.
House Dems plan to offer security funding boost, but not for border wall
WASHINGTON – Wisconsin’s two U.S. senators are likely to be on opposite sides of a pair of key shutdown votes Thursday, as the two parties remain far apart on a path to fully re-open the federal government.
The Senate will vote Thursday on competing bills to end the nation’s longest government shutdown: a GOP measure that includes the more than $5 billion that President Trump demands for border walls, and a Democratic measure to fund the government without the additional wall money.
Trump offered his party a rhyming slogan — “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL” — in a tweet Wednesday, telling Republicans, “use it and pray!”
Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, opposes the wall money.
Like her Democratic colleagues, she says lawmakers shouldn’t let the president use a shutdown to force his policies on Congress.
She plans to vote against the Trump proposal to end the shutdown, and for a Democratic-backed plan that would defer the wall debate and re-open the government.
“We can’t just hold (government employees) hostage as the president digs in his heels and, as many have said, has a temper tantrum,” Baldwin said in a recent interview.
Ron Johnson, the state’s GOP senator, supports the wall funding, calls the situation at the border with Mexico a crisis, and criticizes Democrats for refusing to negotiate a compromise with Trump.
“It’s takes two to tango,” Johnson said in an interview.
Johnson has not yet said how he will vote Thursday on the two bills, but Republicans are expected to overwhelmingly back the Trump proposal.
Since 60 out of 100 votes are required in the Senate for any breakthrough, both bills are expected by most analysts to fail, largely along party lines, leaving part of the government shuttered, and roughly 800,000 federal workers without regular paychecks.
All this is unfolding amid fierce acrimony between Trump and congressional Democrats, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi telling Trump Wednesday that the House will not authorize his State of the Union address in the Capitol (scheduled for Tuesday) until the government is reopened.
At the same time, there are limited signs of legislative movement in the underlying standoff. This is the first time the Senate has really attempted to end the partial shutdown since it began.
In the House, centrist Democrats have asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi to offer Trump a vote on his wall money in exchange for re-opening the government.
And House Democratic leaders say they are planning to offer the president added border security funding (reportedly as much as $5 billion) for security measures other than new walls.
The GOP Senate bill reflects Trump’s proposal to provide the $5.7 billion he wants for the wall. As an offer to Democrats, it would include temporary protection from deportation to some undocumented immigrants.
But it also includes significant new restrictions on asylum-seekers, rules that Democrats called a “poison pill” after learning of them in the legislative text released this week.
The Democrats’ plan would fund the government through Feb. 8 as a precondition to negotiations over border security.
Recent interviews with Johnson and Baldwin reflect the wide gap between the parties.
“I hate shutdown politics. I don’t support shutdowns,” said Johnson, though he acknowledged that Trump himself has taken credit for the shutdown.
But the chairman of the homeland security committee accused Democrats of hypocrisy in their opposition to wall funding because many of them (including Baldwin) supported spending even more on border barriers in a sweeping bipartisan 2013 immigration reform plan that passed the Senate but not the House.
(The border money in that 2013 bill was part of a much larger compromise that also included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a huge priority for many Democrats).
Johnson also contends Democrats simply don’t want to give Trump anything he can call a victory.
“They’re not willing to give President Trump his signature issue, the mandate he received in his election,” said Johnson during a telephone town hall with constituents last week.
Baldwin rejected the notion that Trump received an election mandate for the wall.
“To the extent that Trump ran on (the wall), he promised that Mexico would pay for it,” said Baldwin.
“We need to re-open the government. I do not believe there is bipartisan support in either house for asking taxpayers rather than Mexico to pay for his wall.”
On the floor of the Senate, in television interviews and on Twitter, Baldwin has cited examples of how the shutdown is affecting Wisconsin farmers and many others.
On the Senate floor last week, she spoke next to a picture of the president of Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery, Russ Klisch. Wisconsin brewers can’t get labels approved for the new beers they sell outside the state because of the shutdown.
“I am for stronger border security. I am supportive of using taxpayer dollars in the smartest and most efficient ways that we can. And the … experts would point Congress in a very different direction in terms of the deployment of technology, surveillance and other means than either a concrete or steel wall,” Baldwin said.
Johnson has been trying to gather support from the White House and GOP colleagues for a bill to pay “essential” federal employees who have have been required to work, without pay, during the shutdown.
He says he has more than 20 GOP co-sponsors and argues that passing his bill could “change the dynamic” in the shutdown debate.
But Johnson said last week that some in his party are reluctant to support the measure because they believe that “without leverage (from the shutdown), the president will never get funding for a wall. They believe that (my bill) reduces leverage. I don’t agree with that.”