Pelosi, Schumer To Trump: "Let's Debate Border Funds in Private"

[GMDino]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/us/politics/fact-check-trump-shutdown.html

Part of the article:

Quote:Most federal workers, even those with rent owed and bills due, would gladly forgo their paycheck as a measure of support for his $5.6 billion border wall, President Trump said on Friday.


He also noted that Mexico would actually be paying for the wall through a new trade agreement, which at the very least raised the question of why the government had to be shut down over a funding dispute involving American tax dollars if the funding was coming from another country. And then there was a Plan C: He said he could use “emergency powers” to build the wall.

The wall was needed for many reasons, Mr. Trump said. Stopping drug and human trafficking, and a nonspecific reference to a torrent of terrorists and coyotes easily flowing in over the southern border. “They drive right in, and they make a left,” he said.

But there also was sunshine amid the gloom. Mr. Trump spoke of a stunningly positive jobs report and a stock market that soared, at least for a day. Lower gas prices? One person to thank.


In his first meeting about a shutdown with Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office last month, the president forcefully said that he alone would own the shutdown. On Friday, he was selling shares in it. “You can call it the Schumer or the Pelosi or the Trump shutdown,” he said. “Doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s just words.”


Could he reach a compromise with Democrats to end the shutdown by coupling wall funding with a pathway to citizenship for the young immigrants known as Dreamers? Mr. Trump responded that Democrats lost interest as soon as the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against his administration’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (A deal on the program and to avoid an earlier government shutdown in early 2018 faltered last January, after Mr. Trump made vulgar remarks on immigration. The court ruled on the case in November.)


That was such a bad decision from the court, Mr. Trump asserted, that even his predecessor, “when he signed the DACA, with the executive order, made a statement to the effect, this isn’t going to work.” (President Barack Obama did not sign an executive order to implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He announced it as a Department of Homeland Security policy in a speech in 2012. He did not say it would not work, but called it a “temporary stopgap.”)