Shutdown Corner?

Will there be another government shutdown this week? “I sure hope not,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley on Fox News Monday. But it doesn’t sound like there’s much hope for finding a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and border wall funding, which held up a budget resolution in January for a few days. That resolution funded the government through February 8, giving Congress and the White House a few weeks to find a solution that would get enough Senate Democrats on board.

But the latest bipartisan proposal, from Senators John McCain and Chris Coons, was even farther from what the White House is seeking. Their bill does not immediately fund a border wall and also fails to address two additional Trump must-haves that restrict legal immigration: ending chain migration and the visa lottery. “It takes a special kind of person that is worse than Graham-Durbin,” said Gidley, referring to an earlier proposal from Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin. “They did it.”

Here was President Donald Trump Monday morning on Twitter, not sounding as if he’s closing in on a deal:

In all likelihood, Congress is headed for another short-term budget resolutionuntil the immigration impasse can be resolved. But notice how the point of negotiation is moving away from the White House’s position. It was quite a concession for Trump to agree to a blanket amnesty for 1.8 million people who were illegally brought into the country as minors—and they might have gotten a considerable concession from enough Democrats for it in the money for a wall. But in asking for just a little more—the additional restrictions on legal immigration—the White House may not just be pushing away gettable Democrats willing to buck their own party on the wall. Would there be enough Republicans, who are more split on the question of legal immigration than on that of cracking down on illegal immigration, to back Trump? It’s not clear there would be.

Mark It Down—“Yeah, March 5th is the deadline." —Raj Shah, White House deputy press secretary, on when there needs to be a legislative fix for DACA before ending the program.