Trump Storms Out of Shutdown Meeting with Dems

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Plus, the deficit is now on pace to top $1 trillion this year

‘A Total Waste of Time’

President Trump nailed it. He reportedly told television anchors at an off-the-record lunch before his first Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday night that the strategy, suggested by his advisers, of giving a speech and then heading to the border on Thursday was “not going to change a damn thing.” He was right.

The two sides remain dug in 19 days into the shutdown, and a Wednesday afternoon negotiating session in the White House situation room broke down quickly, with Trump calling it “a total waste of time.”

His Tuesday night address, warning of a “humanitarian crisis” at the southern border and stoking fear about the dangers of illegal immigration, didn’t change a thing. The Democratic rebuttal by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, urging an end to the ongoing partial government shutdown, didn’t change a thing either, aside from launching a slew of memes.

At Wednesday’s meeting, Democrats reportedly again asked Trump to reopen the government. In response, he asked Pelosi if she would agree to fund his wall, and when Pelosi said no, Trump left. “I said bye-bye, nothing else works,” the president tweeted.

The bottom line: We’re still where we were last month, except that some 800,000 federal workers are about to miss their first paychecks because of the stalemate, and the shutdown is set to become the longest in history on Saturday. House Democrats, meanwhile, are set to ramp up the pressure on Republicans with a series of votes starting Wednesday to fund closed departments and agencies — votes that could highlight growing cracks in GOP unity.

Trump Again Talks ‘National Emergency’

Trump on Wednesday again invoked the idea of declaring a national emergency and bypassing Congress to authorize construction of a border wall. “We might work a deal and if we don’t I may go that route,” he said. “I have the absolute right to do national emergency if I want. My threshold will be if I can’t make a deal with people that are unreasonable.”

Why it matters: “Importantly, this is the first time Trump has explicitly said the national emergency declaration is his backup plan,” writes The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “Trump has now admitted that his decision relies not on whether it’s actually an emergency, but on whether such a declaration is needed politically and legally to build the wall.”

The GOP’s Pressure Point: Polls Show Public Blames Trump for Shutdown

Polls show voters largely blame Trump for the shutdown, and don’t favor the wall he wants to build even as they agree that there’s a crisis or at least a problem at the border with Mexico.

In a Reuters-Ipsos poll released Tuesday, 51 percent of respondents said that Trump “deserves most of the blame” for the shutdown, up four percentage points from a similar poll in late December. Just under a third of respondents blamed congressional Democrats.

The poll also found that 35 percent of adults support a spending bill that includes funding for the wall, and only 25 percent support the president’s decision to keep the government closed until Congress approves funding for a wall. The poll of 2,203 U.S. adults was conducted from January 1 to 7 and has a credibility interval or 2 percentage points.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted January 4 to 6 found that 47 percent of registered voters say Trump is mostly to blame for the shutdown, compared to 33 percent who blame Congressional Democrats and 5 percent who point to congressional Republicans. The poll also found that 42 percent call the border situation a crisis, while another 37 percent say the U.S. has “a problem” at the border.

The public is split on the issue of a border wall, with 47 percent opposed and 44 percent supporting construction. Among Republicans, though, 72 percent say the nation faces a crisis at the border and 82 percent support Trump’s wall.
Even so, nearly two-thirds of voters polled said that the president should not shutdown the government to achieve his goals. The poll surveyed 1,989 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

Quote of the Day

“If this shutdown continues to March 1 and the debt ceiling becomes a problem several months later, we may need to start thinking about the policy framework, the inability to pass a budget... and whether all of that is consistent with triple-A.”

– James McCormack, global head of sovereign ratings at Fitch, warning Wednesday that the ongoing government shutdown and political dysfunction might lead to a cut in the United States triple-A credit rating.

Deficit Jumped Over First Months of Fiscal 2019, on Pace to Top $1 Trillion for the Year

The federal deficit jumped $92 billion in the first three months of fiscal 2019, up 41 percent from the same period in 2018, according to estimates published by the Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday. The deficit, which totaled $317 billion for the first quarter, is now on pace to top $1 trillion for the year.

Some kay data points:

Factoring in payment timing shifts that reduced the deficit for the first three months of fiscal 2018, the deficit would have risen by $47 billion, or 21 percent.
Receipts from October through December totaled $771 billion, up less than 1 percent. Corporate taxes fell by $9 billion, or 15 percent, and individual income and payroll taxes dropped by $1 billion, or less than 1 percent.
Outlays jumped by $93 billion, or 9 percent.
The cost of net interest on the public debt grew by $16 billion, or 19 percent, as a result of higher interest rates and a larger federal debt. Interest payments from October through December totaled $102 billion.
Outlays for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid increased by $17 billion, or 3 percent.

The latest estimates “continued a trend from the final three quarters of 2018, after the tax cuts took effect,” says Jim Tankersley of The New York Times: “falling tax receipts, at a time of relatively strong economic growth — a combination that shows the tax cuts are achieving nothing close to the administration’s promise that they would pay for themselves.”

Trump Tells FEMA to Halt Funds for California Wildfires

In a Wednesday morning tweet, President Trump said he had instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cut off funding for California wildfire relief unless the state improves its forest management.

“Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen,” Trump tweeted. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”

Trump’s initial tweet misspelled forest as “forrest.” The president later retweeted the statement with the spelling corrected.

FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are currently without funding as a result of the partial government shutdown.

Trump has previously criticized California’s forest management practices and threatened to withhold disaster relief funding from the state. Experts, though, have pushed back on the president for downplaying the impact of climate change, and California Democrats slammed Trump’s latest threat, questioning whether Trump would be able to pull FEMA funds.

“The federal government controls more of California’s forests than the state - and big recent wildfires there were not forest fires,” Toronto Star fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted. “There’s a lot of legit criticism of both fed and state under-maintenance (https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article216160995.html), but experts say Trump is wildly misinformed.”