Mulvaney: Trump to pursue border wall 'with or without Congress'

WASHINGTON — Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday said President Donald Trump is prepared to act “with or without Congress” to direct $5.7 billion in taxpayer funds to the construction of a southern border wall, and did not rule out the possibility of a future shutdown over the impasse on wall funding.

"The president’s commitment is to protect the nation, and he’ll do it either with or without Congress," Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday” two days after Trump buckled to mounting pressure and signed a bill to end the longest government shutdown in U.S history. The bill immediately put back to work 800,000 federal employees who had gone unpaid for five weeks, but was devoid of any of the wall funding Trump has long sought.

Mulvaney, appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” said Trump was willing to force another shutdown in three weeks if congressional leaders do not back his wall request in bipartisan negotiations. The measure Trump signed on Friday, reopens the federal government through Feb. 15 as he and lawmakers attempt to reach a compromise on border security funding.

“I think he actually is,” Mulvaney said when asked if Trump was prepared for another shutdown. “Keep in mind he’s willing to do whatever it takes to secure the border ... He doesn't want to shut the government down. Let's make that very clear. He doesn't want to declare a national emergency. What he wants to do is fix this the way things are supposed to get fixed.”

Mulvaney on "Fox News Sunday" did not answer when asked if Trump would be willing to accept less than $5.7 billion.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have both said Democrats will not support any funding for a wall, but will support additional funding for the use of drones, vehicle scanners and other technology to guard the U.S. border with Mexico.

Mulvaney, on “Face the Nation,” noted Democrats in the past supported funding for additional fencing along the border. He said the steel-slat barrier Trump is proposing is essentially the same thing.

“We need to get beyond this fight of what’s a wall, what’s a fence,” Mulvaney said.

Trump, who for 35 consecutive days insisted he would not sign any legislation to reopen the government that did not include wall funding, continued to tweet during the weekend about the need for a “powerful Wall” declaring “We will build the wall!”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle, making the Sunday political talk show rounds, spoke against using a shutdown as a bargaining tool.

"Right now, I think that both sides have acted in a disgraceful manner," former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, a Republican who served three terms and lives on Long Island, said Sunday on "The Cats Roundtable” radio show on AM 970. "They are just worried about politics, they're worried about the next election."

D'Amato said he supported offering young immigrants who entered the country illegally as children through no fault of their own, a pathway to citizenship. Trump in 2017 rescinded the Obama-era immigration program known as Deferred Action for Children Arrivals, or DACA, that granted provisional legal status to some 800,000 enrollees, but has since offered a three-year extension of the program, which is currently tied up in the courts, in exchange for wall funding.

"You can't let the right wing run the whole place, and those, and I would call them 'wackadoodles,' it's like 'oh no you should never give them a pathway,' they're out of their mind." D'Amato said. "Maybe they came over or their ancestors on the Mayflower, but most of us didn't, we immigrated here. So if people who have led a good life for 20-plus years, like many of those DACA people have, you don't discriminate against them, you want to keep them here. They're important. We want immigrants, but we want an immigration policy where people follow the law."

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House Democratic Caucus chairman, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said shutdowns are “not [a] legitimate” way to debate policy, adding that Congress “should take a hard look” at preventing shutdowns from being used as a negotiation tactic.

Trump on Sunday cited misleading statistics to continue pushing his claim that non-U.S. citizens are illegally voting in large numbers.

“58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” Trump tweeted.

The president was inaccurately summarizing statistics compiled by the Texas secretary of state last week, which found that 95,000 registered voters provided some form of documentation when registering for a state ID that indicated they were a non-citizen, such as a green card, according to The Texas Tribune. Of that group, 58,000 cast a ballot in at least one election between 1996 and 2018, but state officials noted that they “could have become naturalized citizens” by the time they cast their vote, and advised counties to check on the status of each individual.