Must be the new Latino poll Trump just hit 50% in
Democrats are livid about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s continued refusal, on their behalf, to engage in any negotiations with President Donald Trump over his planned wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a freshman from Michigan, is publicly urging Pelosi to drop the games and “get in the damn room” with Trump and negotiate on the wall.
“We all have a fire under us to get something done,” Slotkin said, per a local news report. “We’re trying to still figure out the dynamic between all of us, and the leadership is still trying to figure out how to manage this very, very energetic and outspoken class.”
Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have flatly refused to negotiate at all over the border wall amid what is now the record longest government shutdown in U.S. history, lasting more than five weeks. About a quarter of the federal government shut down before Christmas over the impasse, when Democrats refused to provide the necessary votes to fund the beginning $5.7 billion of construction of Trump’s wall on the border. The shutdown lasted through the holidays into the new year and new Congress, and as it drags out, Pelosi and Schumer continue to refuse to back down or even talk about the wall.
Trump faced the nation with his first-ever Oval Office address, televised nationally on all the networks, which cut into regular programming to carry it, a couple weeks ago, in which he made the case that the nation faces a crisis on the border. Pelosi and Schumer, in their much-panned response, downplayed the situation and blamed Trump for escalating to this point.
Since then, Pelosi has threatened to cancel President Trump’s scheduled State of the Union address before Congress next Tuesday, Jan. 29, even canceling a security walkthrough that the administration is pushing to continue, while the president and his team insist the State of the Union will still be given on Jan. 29. Further complicating matters is the fact that President Trump waited until Pelosi and other top Democrats had boarded a U.S. Air Force bus on Capitol Hill that would take them to a military jet for a government trip to Afghanistan and Europe to assert his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to cancel their trip, saying Pelosi and Democrats should stay in Washington to end the shutdown instead.
Slotkin is not the only Democrat speaking out, but she is certainly one of the loudest. Per the New York Times, she says she is open to physical barriers along the border:
As someone who worked on preserving the homeland her entire life, I’m ready to talk about homeland security. I don’t think we need a wall from sea to shining sea. But am I willing to talk about more fencing and more drones and technology and radar and border agents? Absolutely.
At a town hall in New York, freshman Democrat Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-NY) pushed for a compromise with Trump.
“There is common ground,” Delgado said, according to a local news report. “I don’t think there’s much disagreement on the fact that we do have to figure out how to secure our borders. We do have to figure out how to course correct our immigration system, it is flawed, it is broken, we do need to figure out some concrete ways how to solve the problem and do so in a collaborative and cooperative fashion, absolutely.”
h/t Jake