President, aides pressure lawmakers on border wall
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his top aides applied new pressure Sunday on lawmakers to include money for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in a must-pass government funding bill, raising the possibility of a federal government shutdown this week.
In a pair of tweets, Trump attacked Democrats for opposing the wall and insisted that Mexico would pay for it “at a later date,” despite repeated campaign promises that did not include that qualifier. And top administration officials appeared on Sunday news shows to press for money for the wall, including White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who said Trump might refuse to sign a spending bill that does not include money for the wall.
Democrats said they vigorously oppose any money for the border wall in a new spending bill, setting the stage for a last-minute showdown as the White House and lawmakers scramble to pass a stopgap bill before funding expires at midnight Friday.
Trump’s position could also put him at odds with Republican congressional leaders, some of whom have voiced skepticism about including wall funding in the most immediate spending bill. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., made clear to rank-and-file GOP lawmakers on Saturday that his top priority was to pass a bill to keep government open.
“The Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members,” Trump tweeted Sunday. In a subsequent tweet, he wrote: “Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early, Mexico will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall.”
On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace asked Mulvaney, “Will he (Trump) sign a government funding bill that does not include funding for the border wall?”
“Yeah, and I think you saw his answer just in your little lead-in, which is: We don’t know yet,” Mulvaney said in the interview. He was referring to comments Trump recently made to the Associated Press.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus appeared to take a slightly less rigid approach to getting money for the border wall, repeatedly talking more generally about the need for “border security.”
Democrats took a hard stance against the wall.
“The wall is, in my view, immoral, expensive, unwise, and when the president says, ‘Well, I promised a wall during my campaign,’ I don’t think he said he was going to pass billions of dollars of cost of the wall on to the taxpayer,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said on “Meet the Press.”
The spending showdown comes as Congress prepares to return from a two-week recess with a busy to-do list. Trump and some other Republicans have been pressing to revive work on health-care legislation, which stalled last month because Republicans could not agree on a strategy for repealing and replacing former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration plans to release a very general sketch of its tax reform plan on Wednesday, Mulvaney said.