President Trump and Nancy Pelosi are locked in an epic battle of wills but only one side is willing to negotiate – Trump.
That’s is what separates the sides – Trump wants money allocated for the wall – he asked for $5 billion but will take less as long as Congress officially puts money towards the wall.
Pelosi won’t even talk until the government is open again, but she let the cat out of the bag in a meeting with Trump when she flat out told him no wall even if he opens the government.
That is not a negotiation, that is a hostage situation. Enter George and Laura Bush – Pelosi and the rest of the establishment expected a strong denunciation of Trump from the former President.
Instead, she got a rebuke of her no negotiation position. Look this only ends one way, in compromise – Trump gets some but not all the money he wanted for the wall.
From The Hill: Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush, delivered pizzas to Secret Service members on Friday, calling for lawmakers “on both sides” to end the ongoing partial government shutdown.
“@LauraWBush and I are grateful to our Secret Service personnel and the thousands of Federal employees who are working hard for our country without a paycheck,” the former president wrote in an Instagram post-Friday afternoon.
“And we thank our fellow citizens who are supporting them. It’s time for leaders on both sides to put politics aside, come together, and end this shutdown,” he added.
Former presidents and first ladies receive lifetime Secret Service protection.
Roughly 800,000 federal employees have been furloughed or forced to work without pay amid the shutdown, which began on Dec. 22.
President Trump signed a bill this week guaranteeing back-pay to federal workers who were furloughed during the shutdown. Bush’s comments are his first public remarks on the shutdown.
Earlier today in another rebuke to the Democrats, Senate Republicans blocked another cheap political stunt by Pelosi to reopen the government.
Look, Mitch McConnell has said he will not bring anything to the floor unless it can pass both houses and Trump will sign it – in other words – get to the White House Pelosi and make a deal.
From The Hill: Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked to take up a House-passed bill that would fund the department through Feb. 8. It’s the third time Democrats have tried to bring up the stopgap measure.
But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) objected to the request “on behalf of the majority leader,” referring to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
It’s the third time McConnell has blocked the bill to temporarily reopen DHS, which is at the center of the shutdown fight. He’s also blocked a bill that would reopen the rest of the impacted departments and agencies three times, most recently on Thursday.
McConnell has warned for weeks that he will not let the Senate take up any government funding bill that isn’t the product of a deal between congressional Democrats and Trump, arguing they would amount to “show votes.”
“There’s no way around it. Having show votes in the Senate doesn’t solve the problem,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.
