The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump & Congressional Leaders Meet To Discuss Border Security Funding

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

A closed-door briefing for congressional leaders in the White House Situation Room on Wednesday failed to resolve any issues between Democrats and the Trump administration over funding for border security.The stalemate has led to a partial government shutdown, now nearing the two-week mark. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe,. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Alex Bernardo calling from Portland, Oregon. It's been a busy week. On Monday, I celebrated my birthday. On Tuesday, I celebrated Christmas. And now to celebrate the New Year's, I'm flying to Disneyland with my girlfriend of 13 years, where we're going back to recreate the spot where we first met, and I'm planning on proposing. But shh, she doesn't know. This podcast was recorded at... Is he proposing in the podcast then, effectively, or did it already happen?

I have so many questions. Wait, they met at Disney? Met at Disneyland. Maybe he worked there. Anyway, it's 5.35 on Wednesday, January 2nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully, including my relationship status. All right, here's the show, and Happy New Year.

So clearly, please send us a follow-up, letting us know how it went and also filling in the details. Please fill in all of the answers to our questions. Happy 2019. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is day 12 of the partial government shutdown fueled by the president's calls for a border wall. We're in a shutdown because Democrats's calls for a border wall. We're in a shutdown because Democrats refuse to fund the border security.

Today, Democrats and Republicans met with the president for the first time since the shutdown began to discuss what happens next. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. Happy New Year, everybody. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. New Year. Same shutdown. And spoiler alert, the different sides did not seem to come to the same conclusion of what happens next in that meeting. So we'll talk about that meeting in a moment. First, we can set it up by another meeting the president had today.

He met with his cabinet. He had a lot to say about the shutdown, repeating things he's been saying for a while, saying that he's happy to wait it out for border security, that Democrats are weak on borders. But Kelsey, there was one thing he said that kind of says a lot about how Congress is viewing this whole thing. And that was responding to a question about how much money for a border wall he would actually accept. Would you accept anything less than $2.5 billion? No, not $2.5 billion. No, we're asking for $5.6 billion. And, you know, somebody said $2.5 billion. No, look. That somebody that the president was talking about was the vice president,

Mike Pence. He is the one who suggested $2.5 billion. And this is exactly why Democrats don't want to negotiate with anybody but President Trump. And heck, Republicans don't want to negotiate with anybody except for President Trump, because he often goes out and says anybody else who's done the negotiating for him is wrong. So this is not a new situation. If you'll remember, the Senate already passed a spending bill before the shutdown. They passed it unanimously. That would have kept the government open. They thought the president was going to accept it. And then he changed his mind.

So they're in a situation now where they will not move forward on anything without a guarantee from the president that this will end the shutdown. But Ayesha, aside from that initial shift from being OK without the border funding to saying, no, I want the wall that started the shutdown, President Trump really hasn't budged at all, has he? He hasn't budged so much on the number, but he has been kind of all over the place on what exactly he's asking for, whether it's a wall. We've talked about the steel slats or the some of its fence.

But he says there has to be some type of barrier. Isn't it weird that like basically nothing had happened between the initial start of the shutdown and today when it comes to actual conversations between the key players here? Well, it's kind of hard to get anything done right if they're not talking. We've heard from Pelosi's office that the last time she had a conversation with the president before today was on December 11th, when there was that big, well-televised meeting between President Trump, then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. And then the president called Pelosi and said that they would be talking again in the future. That just never happened. So if the vice president was the person who was supposed to be standing in and doing negotiations, as we've heard he was doing, that really wasn't all that

helpful if the president's going to come in and, as we already said, step all over those negotiations. This has been one of the strangest shutdowns I have ever seen happen. And another thing that wasn't happening, not only were they not talking, but President Trump, even though he stayed in during the shutdown and didn't go to Mar-a-Lago as he had planned, he didn't try to use that to really message and to, you know, he wasn't doing press conferences every day saying, I'm here. He was on Twitter, but he wasn't really using that time to get the message out and put pressure on Democrats. You know, there wasn't much else going on. He would have gotten a lot of attention, but he didn't do that.

So what happened at today's meeting? Well, if you hear it from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, not a whole lot. We had a good discussion of the obviously the border security issue. I don't think any particular progress is made today. Ah, well, I like how he cracked up. He couldn't keep it straight. So this was a briefing, not a meeting. Democrats kept pointing that beforehand.

The White House had asked them to come to the White House, to the Situation Room, to hear about border security. The thing that I would say about that is they kind of already know the parameters of what the border security situation is, right? This is not new information for them. The new thing that they need is an offer from the president for what he will sign. And they need some sort of signal that there is a space for them to move to a compromise. Having a briefing on the statistics of how many people are crossing the border and how effective the current patrol processes are really isn't what's going to move the ball forward here. And it seems like the Democrats took the opportunity to just turn it into a negotiating session

and make those points to the president. And after the meeting ended and they came outside. Nancy Pelosi, who will very likely become speaker of the House tomorrow, said this. We're asking the president to open up government. We are giving him a Republican path to do that. Why would he not do it? We should explain when she says a Republican path. What they're talking about is Democrats want to vote on the six already bipartisan, already worked out spending bills that are out there that would reopen the vast majority of the government and then give themselves another month or so until February 8th to work on just the Department of Homeland Security, which would oversee a border wall and handles border security. She's calling it a Republican solution because Republicans helped negotiate those, the six of the seven bills. So Aisha, what is the White House saying to this proposal from the Democrats?

I assume they're not buying this line that, hey, it's Republican. All right. Not at all. So they're basically saying without any funding for a wall there, there's border security, but not at a higher level than what it's been. Without any funding for a wall, it's just unacceptable. It's a no-go. And they aren't really even considering it a counteroffer. They're saying this is not a part of the negotiation. No, it's totally right now kind of dead on arrival.

They're not going to support it. So one other comment after this meeting broke up caught our attention, and that is from Mitch McConnell. We're hopeful that somehow in the coming days and weeks, we'll be able to reach an agreement. Weeks in the coming days and weeks. Weeks. So it seems like no end anytime soon. We will talk about the weeks aspect of what comes next and how long this could last after a quick break. Connecting team members across the globe. Imagine seeing up to 49 people on the screen at once in digital video. Share anything, a file, a video, a photo, via desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile.

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And we are back. Okay. So not exactly a blockbuster, you know, marathon, whatever, whatever negotiation with all sorts of cliches about finishing a deal. Like the opposite of that, right? Yeah. If there's an opposite, it's everybody staring at each other and saying, so same, bye. Yeah. So what do we know what happens next?

Is there another possibly equally unproductive meeting planned? Well, we hear that there may be a meeting on Friday. My understanding in talking to people from both sides of the aisle when they came back to the capitals, there was an understanding that there would be a future meeting, possibly Friday, to continue talks. Kevin McCarthy, who will be the minority leader, he said that we've been invited back on Friday. He was saying after the leadership elections, there's kind of been this implication from the White House that maybe Democrats can't really negotiate right now because there was a fight over Pelosi becoming speaker of the House and that she has to kind of maybe show that she's whatever reason, there seems to be this implication that once that's over, then maybe they can try to start actually getting down to work on a deal. So when Democrats do take over, they have a big plan. And we've already talked about how Republicans in the House will respond to this. But if they are able to pass a bill that would ostensibly reopen the government, if only Republicans could get along and go along, that really does build up

pressure on Republicans in the Senate to do something. Whether or not Trump views that as pressure on him, it really does kind of start to change the dynamics of political opinion, right? Because if Democrats have taken a proactive action, it makes it harder for Republicans to say that they are at fault for this, though I would imagine they will continue to say that. Right. And I think the other big thing that we're waiting on is any substantive new polling to come out. Obviously, not many productive polls are happening over the holidays. NPR did a poll just before the shutdown began, finding what a lot of other surveys found, that the majority of Americans do not think a border wall is a good idea to begin with, and a majority of Americans do not think it's worth shutting down the government over.

Very curious to see which side is being blamed and how much opinions have shifted. And not to sound like a broken record, but we have talked about this many times, that these polls that happen right after a shutdown or when a shutdown is happening about who is to blame. We have not seen political consequences for the past several shutdowns. This might be different because it might last a lot longer and the person to blame might be clear in people's minds. But in the past, there hasn't been a big impact when it comes to election. But but even if the polls won't probably because elections are going to happen way down the line, this will seem like, you know, this will be way in the rear view, hopefully, by the next time we have an election. It could put some pressure, right?

Because right now there's the messaging game. And when you see that you're on the losing end of that, maybe that does put pressure on Republicans or Democrats if they come out on the losing end to do something. Well, I guess it depends on who you're looking at in the polls. If you're President Trump, you're only looking at how this plays to your base and on the networks that you watch on television, you might get a very different, you know, a different read on the politics of the moment than Nancy Pelosi, who's looking at her base and how that reads on the television network she's watching. All right. So the next key things to look for, whatever sort of sense we get of how people are taking the shutdown in, that next meeting between President Trump and congressional leaders that's slated for Friday.

And tomorrow, when a new Congress is sworn in, Democrats are in charge of the House and they'll vote on the spending bills. So all that stuff is sworn in. Democrats are in charge of the House and they'll vote on these spending bills. So all that stuff is happening next. We will have another podcast in your feed tomorrow after the new Congress comes. They elect a speaker and they vote on this. We'll talk about that and the rest of the week's news. Until then, you can head to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe to our roundup of the best online stories and analysis comes out every weekend. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Ayesha Roscoe.

I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.