White House chief of staff says ‘absolutely cannot’ rule out another shutdown
In appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said “you absolutely cannot” eliminate the possibility of another shutdown this coming Friday if a deal is not reached over the wall.
The White House had asked for $US5.7 billion ($8 billion), a figure rejected by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.
“Is a shutdown entirely off the table? The answer is no,” Mick Mulvaney told NBC. “You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take $US5.7 (billion) off the table,” Mulvaney added. .
“But if you end up some place in the middle, yeah, then what you probably see is the President say, ‘yeah, OK, and I’ll go find the money some place else’.”
The White House had asked for $US5.7 billion ($8 billion), a figure rejected by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.
The White House and many Republicans want to push the amount that would be spent for building physical barriers to $US2 billion. Democrats have said they will keep that figure below $US2 billion, with some saying they support perhaps half that.
A shutdown comes if Congress fails to pass the budget legislation for the next fiscal year or the president refuses to sign off on it. The last shutdown lasted 35 days, the longest in the United States history.
The prolongation was prompted by disagreements between the Democrats and Republicans over President Donald Trump’s insistence that the budget include funding for a wall along the US-Mexican border to combat illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The Democrats oppose the wall, calling it unnecessary and ineffective.
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Richard Shelby said disagreements over how to address Trump’s border security concerns bubbled away at Congress.
“The talks are stalled right now,” he told “Fox News Sunday,” rekindling fears that the deadlock could prompt another shutdown.
He said the sticking point was the Democrats’ desire to cap the number of the beds in detention facilities for people who enter the country illegally.
While the two sides seemed close to clinching a deal late last week, significant gaps remained and momentum appears to have slowed.
