Thread: The four big fights Trump and Congress must resolve to avert a government shutdown

The four big fights Trump and Congress must resolve to avert a government shutdown

Deirdre Shesgreen, USA TODAY Published 10:36 a.m. ET Jan. 15, 2018 | Updated 11:17 a.m. ET Jan. 15, 2018

WASHINGTON — Congress has until Friday to reach an agreement on a thicket of thorny issues, and the talks don’t appear to be going very smoothly right now.

That means President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hurtling toward a government shutdown, with funding set to run out at midnight on Jan. 19.

Here’s a look at the four key obstacles lawmakers face in their efforts to forge a deal by Friday.

Spending caps

Lawmakers are currently faced with tight budget caps, agreed to in 2011, that limit how much they can spend for the rest of fiscal year 2018 and beyond.

Both Republicans and Democrats want to lift those caps — GOP leaders want a big boost for defense; Democrats say any defense increase should be paired with an equal hike for domestic programs.

House and Senate leaders have been negotiating for weeks over how much to increase the caps and how to divide the pot between defense and domestic spending. They insist the talks are going well, while offering no details.

“We think the solution is in sight,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters on Thursday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., offered a similarly rosy assessment. But he noted that once they have settled on a top-line number, lawmakers on the appropriations committees in the House and Senate will need time to craft a spending bill that sets specific funding levels for every government agency and program.

In other words, Congress will almost certainly have to pass another short-term measure before Jan. 19 to buy themselves more time. Whether such a stop-gap funding bill could pass is unclear; opposition to a short-term deal is bubbling up from conservatives and liberals alike.

The Dreamers

Trump's most recent comment, calling Haiti and other African comments, 'shithole countries' has not quelled critics accusing Trump of racist. Here are some other times Trump's comments were questionably racist. USA TODAY

The partisan debate over how to deal with the Dreamers — the 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children — grew more acrimonious last week after President Trump allegedly called Haiti, El Salvador, and other African nations “shithole countries” and suggested the U.S. should instead encourage more immigration from Norway, a predominately white country.

The remarks sparked a political uproar, with condemnation pouring in from Capitol Hill and around the globe even as Trump denied saying it and several Republicans who were in meeting also denied he said it or couldn't recall his exact words. Trump said he used “tough” language during the session, while Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Trump’s comments were “vile” and “racist.”

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that any deal to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected Dreamers "is probably dead because Democrats really don't want it." Trump charged Democrats were trying to take money away from the military.

Durbin and several other lawmakers had gone to the White House last Thursday to pitch an agreement they’d reached on immigration—granting the Dreamers a path to citizenship, allocating $2.7 billion for border security and tweaking a visa program open to applicants from countries with low immigration rates to the U.S.

Trump rejected the deal, declaring it “outlandish” and a “setback” in a series of tweets on Friday morning. He accused Democrats of wanting to shut down the government over the immigration issue.

Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer has insisted on attaching a Dreamers compromise to the spending bill, saying it’s the only viable path to getting it done. Otherwise, he said, it will never pass the House, where many conservatives are opposed to extending protections to the Dreamers.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Thursday that any immigration measure “will not be a part of any overall spending agreement.”

That leaves the two sides divided over substance as well as process — not to mention reeling over the “shithole” brouhaha.

Trump just needs to walk away, Republicans need to hold the line, if that means shutting it down, then so be it. Americans are fed up with illegal immigration, pity parties, sob stories, lost jobs, deflated wages, millions more on Medicaid and stressed services because of illegal immigration and excess legal immigration. We expect and demand that our Congress and President fix it, and Trump and most Republicans seem committed to do it. But we need more Republicans in the House and Senate to achieve this, which means we must defy history and elect at least 9 more Republicans to the US Senate and several more in the House to be sure in 2018.

This massive immigration of all types has to be stopped. We have to explain this to Democrats so they can vote with US for Republican candidates in the General Election Mid-Terms. No one can do this better than Trump. Hold the line and lets go win some mid-term elections, then we'll pass our immigration bills and appropriate our border security and interior enforcement funding in 2019 and fix this mess once and for all.