Shutdown stalemate after meeting of White House, congressional staff

President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Friday. Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta
WASHINGTON — White House officials and congressional aides ended talks on Saturday in a stalemate with no deal to reopen closed agencies or fund a border wall, but both sides said they would meet again Sunday with the federal shutdown in its third week.
The White House and Democrats remained dug into the positions that led to and have prolonged the partial government shutdown, accusing each other of refusing to compromise on President Donald Trump’s demand for more than $5 billion for a border wall.
Vice President Mike Pence described the 2½-hour meeting as “productive” in a tweet, but Democrats called it a missed opportunity to reopen the unfunded agencies that had left 800,000 federal employees without pay, either furloughed or required to work.
“Not much headway made today,” Trump tweeted after being briefed by Pence and his team at the meeting. White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Democrats were “actually, in my mind, there to stall.”
A Democratic source familiar with the meeting said, “The vice president made clear that the White House will not move off of the 5.7 billion dollar proposal that led to the Trump shutdown,” calling that demand “an untenable position that cannot pass the Congress.”
The Democratic congressional staff at the meeting requested “a formal budget justification” for the Trump administration’s request for border security and border wall funding. The Pence aide said that would be provided before the Sunday meeting.
But Democrats also told Pence and Republican staffers that negotiations would be hard to conduct as long as the government remained partially closed. Pence, however, refused to reopen government with a spending deal until Democrats agree to fund a wall, the source said.
With the shutdown likely to continue at least through the middle of next week when Congress returns, some Senate Republicans up for re-election in 2020 — including Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado — are urging Trump to allow the government to reopen.
Nine departments, including Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Transportation and Interior, and other independent agencies shut down on Dec. 22 when they ran out of funding after Trump rejected a compromise bill to keep them open because it did not fund a wall.
Later Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) doubled down on her strategy to have the new House Democratic majority pass appropriation bills already approved by the Senate to show her party is trying to reopen the government.
“Next week, House Democrats will begin passing individual appropriations bills to reopen all government agencies, starting with the appropriations bill that covers the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service,” Pelosi said in a statement. “This action is necessary so that the American people can receive their tax refunds on schedule.”
When the full Congress reconvened on Thursday, House Democrats passed two bills, without money for a wall — one to fund eight departments through September with Senate Republican spending measures and another to fund the Homeland Security Department to Feb. 8.
Trump responded by saying he would veto both bills unless they included $5.6 billion for a border wall. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Senate would not take up any bill that Trump would not sign into law.
On Friday, Trump held a two-hour White House meeting with congressional leaders including Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) without reaching an agreement.
Afterward, Schumer said Trump threatened to keep the shutdown going for “months or even years” to get funding for a border wall. At a Rose Garden news conference, Trump agreed he had, saying, “If we have to stay out for a very long period of time, we're going to do that.”
Trump also announced that Pence would lead a White House team of his senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to work with staffers of Democratic and Republican congressional leaders.
Saturday’s meeting focused on the administration’s case for a physical wall at the southern border, without any "in depth" discussion of Trump’s demand for money, a Pence aide said. Nielsen gave “a full briefing on the crisis at the southern border.”
At least two dozen top White House officials and congressional aides attended the meeting, held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, a photo tweeted by Pence showed.
Before Saturday’s meeting, Trump posted tweets urging Democrats to end their opposition to border wall funding, assessing the effect on unpaid federal workers through a political lens that employee union chiefs say mischaracterizes the workforce.
“I don’t care that most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats,” Trump tweeted, “I want to stop the Shutdown as soon as we are in agreement on Strong Border Security!”
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