Yesterday, Kemberlee blogged about the partial government shutdown, and today, the Senate adjourned until December 27, 2018. The partial government shutdown will not be resolved until they return.
Meanwhile, recent polls show that 81% of Americans believe that border security is “an important issue,” and Republican support for the wall, specifically, is on the increase.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced shortly after 3 p.m. Saturday that there is no deal, and the Senate is adjourned until Thursday, Dec. 27. The White House and Capitol Hill have made little progress towards finding a compromise — President Trump is demanding $5 billion for his border wall, and Democrats insist they won’t give him any of that funding. The government partially shut down at midnight Friday.The partial shutdown won’t have much effect on holiday plans. The post office will stay open, so gift and holiday card stragglers can still put them in the mail. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents will still work, and air travel would continue virtually unaffected.Government employees who are considered “essential,” such as many Secret Service agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents and U.S. troops deployed at the border, will still be working. But a shutdown creates a risk for hundreds of thousands of federal workers: More than 420,000 federal employees would have to go to work without pay. More than 380,000 will be furloughed. Those who work will get paid eventually – and those furloughed likely will – but depending how long the shutdown lasts, they could miss a paycheck.
Yesterday, President Trump announced that he was cancelling his plans to travel to Florida for the Christmas holiday in the hopes that Democrats would come around and support securing our borders.
No such luck, however, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is grandstanding with demands that the president “abandon the wall.”
The Capitol was nearly empty Saturday morning as the House and Senate came back into session, and White House and congressional aides continued to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown over President Trump’s demand for billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.In a conference call with reporters, a senior administration official said the president continues to push $5 billion as his goal for current negotiations, although that may be the president’s opening bid rather than a non-negotiable.”We have continued to put forth what we think is an important expectation for these negotiations, which is $5 billion in border security,” the senior administration official said.. . . . On Saturday, Democrats reiterated that they wouldn’t accept funding for the border wall, suggesting little progress had been made in preliminary discussions between congressional leadership and White House officials.“President Trump, if you want to open the government, you must abandon the wall,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said Saturday.. . . . Schumer intends to remind the vice president that any proposal with funding for the wall cannot pass the Senate, the aide said.
According to reports, the president will remain in Washington, and the First Lady will be flying up to spend Christmas at the White House.
Yesterday, President Trump noted that the Democrats “now own the shutdown.”
He’s not wrong. And one thing we can be sure of, President Trump will not weaponize the shutdown by erecting barricades to keep our nation’s heroes from veteran memorials.
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