With just over 24 hours before the government is set to shutdown, Donald Trump and congressional leaders from both parties emerged from a high-stakes White House meeting on Monday with no agreement, setting the stage for large swaths of the federal government to close after midnight Wednesday.
The impasse came after closed-door talks between the four top congressional leaders and Trump in the Oval Office, where lawmakers appeared to trade blame but make little progress towards a deal. “There are still large differences between us,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters after the meeting, claiming that Republicans refused to engage on their core demands around health care and restoring previous funding cuts.
“Their bill has not one iota of Democratic input,” he added, taking aim at a House-passed seven-week stopgap funding bill that Senate Democrats rejected last week. “That is never how we’ve done this before.”
They can (and do) do that anyway. I don’t think that’s the plan here. To the halfway reasonable people, Republicans control congress. This is on them. The minority party’s job us to play hardball. To the people listening to whatever Republicans say without question, it doesn’t matter. They can make up anything they want a blame democrats. This doesn’t do anything for them.
This is a result of ideology becoming even more important to them than politics, I think.