Trump Storms Out of White House Meeting With Democrats on …

For now, at least, the president seems to have maintained support for his uncompromising position.

Hes like the Missouri mule who sits down in the mud and says, Im not moving, said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said Mr. Trump had made the case that Republicans had a much better chance of prevailing if they remained united in opposition to spending bills to get the government funded again.

What did Benjamin Franklin say at the constitutional convention? Mr. Cornyn told reporters. We need to hang together or well hang separately. Thats what it reminded me of.

Democrats, who are confident Mr. Trump is taking the brunt of the blame for the impasse, showed little sign of capitulation. The House vote to fund financial agencies and the White House was the first of several this week on individual spending bills that are intended to pick off uneasy Republicans. But in the end, it drew only one more Republican than a vote last week to reopen the government. A White House official said Wednesday that Mr. Trump would veto any such bill.

In the Senate, Democrats had managed to grind to a stop unrelated foreign policy legislation to increase pressure on Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, to relent on his insistence that he will not put any bill to reopen the government up for a vote there without Mr. Trumps support.

Democrats offered other warnings to the White House. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said he had warned Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, in a private meeting that a national emergency declaration by Mr. Trump would constitute a major breach of relations between the Pentagon and Congress.

Mr. McConnell continued publicly to insist that the dispute was for Democrats and the president to solve. He has largely absented himself from negotiations, and did not speak during Wednesdays White House session, a position that appeared to be validated on Tuesday by a Politico and Morning Consult poll that found only 5 percent of respondents blamed congressional Republicans for the impasse, compared with 47 percent who blamed Mr. Trump and 33 percent who blamed congressional Democrats.

I cannot urge my Democratic colleagues more strongly to get past this purely partisan spite, rediscover their own past positions on border security and negotiate a fair solution with our president to secure our nation and reopen all of the federal government, Mr. McConnell said in remarks on the Senate floor.

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Trump Storms Out of White House Meeting With Democrats on ...

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