Senate GOP: We need clarity from Trump on border demands
Senate Republicans said on Friday, with less than 10 hours to avert a partial government shutdown, that they are waiting for clarity from President Trump on his funding demands.
GOP senators emerging from a closed-door caucus meeting said they’re hoping for more details from the White House regarding what kind of bill the president would be willing to sign, short of the House-passed measure that includes $5.7 billion for a border wall and security.
A group of Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), met with Trump on Friday morning at the White House. McConnell said after the meeting they would talk again later that day.
{mosads}Asked about potential negotiations to prevent a lapse in funding, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of McConnell’s leadership team, said he believed McConnell was waiting to “get a better sense of what the president might be willing to do.”
“And I don’t believe a strong sense of that came out of that meeting” at the White House, Blunt added.
Blunt didn’t attend that meeting, but when asked what he had been told about it and what the message from the president was, he pointed to three takeaways.
“Mostly, nuclear option and shutdown’s acceptable to him would be the two take away points, I think, and the wall matters and it will be beautiful when built. So there were three takeaway points,” Blunt quipped.
The clamor for more specifics from the administration comes after senators were caught flat-footed when Trump reversed course and told House lawmakers he wouldn’t sign the Senate-passed “clean” stopgap bill that didn’t include a boost in border funding.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), when asked about the path forward, said senators “don’t know what president will sign.”
“That’s the biggest thing we just don’t know what the president will sign,” he added.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) echoed that sentiment, saying they need “to get clarity from the president as to what his priorities are and then get some sort of consensus with the minority leader,” referring to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).
In a tweet knocking Democrats on Friday morning, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also called out the White House on its flip flopping.
“On Wed the WH said they ‘open’ to Senate bill. They should have just told us they opposed it BEFORE we wasted time voting on it,” he tweeted.
The House kicked the shutdown fight back to the Senate on Thursday night when it sent the upper chamber a stopgap bill with the border money and disaster recovery aid.
It was expected to fail in the Senate, where it would need to overcome a 60-vote filibuster. But it ran into an early, unexpected, hurdle when a vote to get on the legislation, where Republicans only needed a simple majority, has remained open for more than two hours.
“Right now, it’s still an open question” if we’ll get on the bill, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters after the vote had been open for more than an hour-and-a-half. “Hopefully we’ll know soon.”
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