President Trump on Saturday put a concrete compromise on the table to end the government shutdown. Democrats’ counteroffer has to be more than the demand from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he fold completely.
The president’s speech was a clear effort to move toward a compromise. He offered a three-year legalization both for the Dreamers and those who’ve lost protection under the Temporary Protected Status program.
And he specifically abjured building a vast concrete wall along the entire border — that is, The Wall as beloved of his base and loathed by the left.
Yet Schumer complained that Trump “keeps putting forward one-sided and ineffective remedies.” Pelosi called the offer a “compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable.” Both demanded the president just agree to reopen the government without a dime of the $5 billion he wants for border control.
One glimmer of hope: Pelosi’s complaint that what’s needed is permanent protection for the Dreamers and TPS folks. Why not make that your counteroffer?
Between the two groups, that’s more than 1 million people whom Democrats claim to care about. The price for helping them: a few billion in spending that Dems oppose mainly because it would be a victory for Trump. (For all the “immoral” talk, they’ve OK’d plenty of walls in the past.)
A few billion, when the 1995-6 shutdown concerned then-President Bill Clinton’s demand for hundreds of billions for “Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment” — a good chunk of which Republicans eventually OK’d even as the compromise led to the first balanced federal budgets in decades.
Trump is asking for far less money in exchange for a Dem win on another immigration front. It’s time for Democrats to quit the theatrics and start negotiating.
Time to bargain.