Back again Sunday: No breakthrough in Saturday discussions on shutdown

[left-of-center2012]

Source: Roll Call

The two sides met for over two hours in Pence’s ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House, while President Donald Trump was firing off tweets about the ongoing partial government shutdown and criticizing Democrats.

Trump has increased his demand in recent days to $5.6 billion. Pence before Christmas offered over $2 billion for the wall and another $400 million for other border security tools to Senate Democrats. Trump mocked the other border security tools as just “fun” things, 'toys'.

A Democratic source familiar with the meeting said the DHS needs will come in the form of a “formal budget justification for the Administration’s position in order to finally determine what the Administration’s request is [because] the White House has been all over the place on numbers for months.”

“Democratic staff in the room were clear that White House must support re-opening government immediately and that it will grow increasingly hard to start formal negotiations with government closed.
Administration officials refused,”

Read more: https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/white-house-dems-border-wall

[TomCADem]

1. Vox - Conservatives won't trade the wall for anything good because they know it's a bad idea

The reason why no deal can be reached is because Republicans have nothing to offer, since they know the wall isn't worth spit.

https://www.vox.com/2018/12/28/18158873/wall-shutdown-trump-dreamers-deal

Spending billions of dollars to build hundreds of miles of additional walling — or “steel slats” or whatever you want to call it — on the US-Mexico border is a bad idea. That’s a critical, underrated feature of the current standoff that has led President Trump to partially shut down the government.

After all, if the president of the United States wants a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project that’s important to him personally and partially fulfills a campaign promise, then he ought to be able to get it. And the time-honored way to get it is to give congressional skeptics something else in exchange. That’s how the system has worked ever since Alexander Hamilton got James Madison to back federal assumption of state debts in exchange for locating the nation’s capital on the banks of the Potomac River.

But back at the beginning of the year, when it seemed as though a compromise involving wall money and a path to citizenship for DREAMers was in the works, it was immigration hardliners in Trump’s own administration who scuttled the deal. That’s certainly their prerogative, but it underscores the core truth of this standoff: Immigration hardliners themselves don’t think the wall is especially useful or important in the real world. If they really wanted a wall, they would go get a wall by offering something — it wouldn’t even necessarily have to be immigration-related — in exchange for it. But since they know the wall is a bad idea, they won’t trade it for anything. Yet precisely because the wall idea is so bad, Democrats, rightly, aren’t going to give it away for free.

[AllaN01Bear]

2. nothing that we cherish shouldnt be negotiated with these slime ,

period. mr . drumph set fourth this shutdown because he couldnt get his wall. im sick of hearing about the wall.

[scarytomcat]

3. I'm very sick of it too

almost everybody including rethugs know the wall is a waste
there is nothing positive about it except jobs for undocumented workers to construct it

[Xipe Totec]

4. Shutdown will continue until there's enough Repug senators turning tail to override a veto. nt

[briv1016]

6. There's already enough votes to override a veto.

That's why Mitch won't let it come up for a vote.

[Xipe Totec]

7. That's hypothetical. It would take less than 5 repubs to make Mitch reconsider

If he wants to continue as majority leader in the Senate.

[brooklynite]

5. UPDATE: Mulvaney: Saturday shutdown meeting 'did not make much progress'

Mulvaney told CNN's Jake Tapper that they "did not make much progress" at the meeting, adding that he thought Democrats were "actually, in my mind, there to stall."

"We didn't make much progress at the meeting, which was surprising to me," Mulvaney said. "I thought we had come in to talk about terms that we could agree on, places where we all agreed we should be spending more time, more attention, things we could do to improve our border security. And yet the opening line from one of the lead Democrat negotiators was that they were not there to talk about any agreement."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/05/politics/mulvaney-shutdown-meeting-cnntv/index.html