Schumer: Trump should sign deal to prevent shutdown

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday said that President Trump should sign a government funding deal that would prevent a second shutdown that would begin Saturday if there were no agreement.

Schumer, while adding the caveat that he didn’t know the details of the tentative agreement, said the “parameters … are good” and Trump “must sign it.”

{mosads}“We must not have a rerun of what happened a few months back where legislators … agreed and President Trump pulled the rug out from under the agreement and caused the shutdown,” Schumer said. 

He added that if Trump doesn’t support the tentative agreement reached on Monday night, “the same thing could happen again. We don’t need it.”

“No one gets everything they want in these agreements,” Schumer said. “The president must sign it and not, not, not cause another shutdown.”

Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Reps. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Kay Granger (R-Texas) announced on Monday night that they had reached an agreement “in principle” ahead of the Feb. 15 deadline for the remaining seven appropriations bills.

The deal, according to multiple congressional sources, would provide $1.375 billion for physical barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. 

That would include 55 miles of barriers, according to senior congressional aides, though a congressional source separately said that a physical concrete wall was prohibited. 

Democrats dropped their demand to cap the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds for immigrants taken into custody in the interior of the country, away from the border, at 16,500.

A congressional aide said the deal included 40,520 ICE detention beds. But senior congressional aides argued that the tentative agreement included “enough flexibility to reach the president’s requested level of 52,000 beds” because of the president’s ability to shuffle funding within the Department of Homeland Security.

The White House has not yet said if the president will support the deal.  

“We’re not sure yet, to be quite honest,” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said during an interview on Fox News when asked if the deal was something Trump would approve. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t specifically say that he would support the deal on Tuesday, saying he looked forward to reviewing the full text. 

But he also pointed to two areas where he thought Democrats had caved: on not spending “more than $1, $1, on new border barriers and the idea that we should impose a hard statuary cap on ICE detainees in the interior of our country.”

“Fortunately, our Democratic colleagues did abandon those unreasonable positions and the negotiations were able to move forward productively,” McConnell added.