President Trump Comments on Unpaid Government Workers being Democrats
MICHAEL SMERCONISH, CNN ANCHOR: We hope they solve lots of crime, but respecting privacy at the same time. You can catch up with us anytime at CNN Go and On Demand. See you next week.</s>CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: We are so glad to have you with us as we are just one hour from Vice President Pence meeting with Congressional staffers across the street from the White House.</s>VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: They will be working toward an agreement to try to end the shutdown, something their bosses have not been able to do for a little more than two weeks now. President Trump is tweeting from the White House this morning, "I don't care that most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats. I want to stop the shutdown as soon as we are in agreement on strong border security. I'm in the White House ready to go. Where are the Dems?"</s>PAUL: Democrats were at the White House yesterday when the president reportedly started the meeting with them by cursing. He told them if a deal isn't reached, the shutdown, which he said he would rather call a strike, could last months or even years.</s>BLACKWELL: Joining us to talk more about plans for the meeting, CNN White House reporter Sarah Westwood and CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes from Capitol Hill. Sarah, let's start with you. The president says where are the Dems. They're next door at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. What are we expecting will happen this morning?</s>SARAH WESTWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well, Victor, expectations for any kind of breakthrough today are low after those Democratic congressional leaders and the president emerged from those high level talks in the Situation Room yesterday sounding very different tones, with those Democrats saying they'd like to see the government reopened while negotiations continued. And President Trump describing the meeting as productive while the Democrats described it as contentious, but indicating his willingness to keep the government partially shuttered indefinitely until he gets funding for his border wall. And he is holding firm at that $5.6 billion sum that House Republicans passed in a spending bill as one of those last piece of legislation that they passed when they were still in the majority, but the president seems increasingly flexible on what qualifies as a wall. He said perhaps steel slats or a see through barrier of some kind would be acceptable to him. As you mentioned, Vice President Pence will be leading the talks today on behalf of the administration, joined by the Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Jared Kushner. The president clearly has some other things on his mind this morning ahead of these staff level talks that he is not slated to attend at the moment. The president tweeted "Many people currently part of my opposition, including President Obama and the Dems, have had campaign violations in some cases for very large sums of money. These are civil cases. They paid a fine and settled. While no big deal, I did not commit a campaign violation." Of course, this is not the first time the president has repeated this dubious and misleading comparison to President Obama. Obama's 2008 campaign did have a civil campaign violation, they paid a fine and settled for it after the campaign, not Obama himself, failed to report some donations on time, failed to return immediately some donations that exceed the legal limit, while the president has been accused by the special counsel of being directly involved in a willful violation of campaign finance laws when, according to prosecutors, he directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to pay off women during the 2016 race who were trying to come out with stories of alleged affairs with the president. So this is a different situation, but ahead of this meeting, the president, clearly, a lot on his mind.</s>PAUL: No doubt. Hey, Kristen, I want to turn to you now and ask you, as we were talking about the fact that the Dems are right next door and they're waiting for the meeting to start in about an hour, what are congressional leaders, congressional staff who are going to be in there, what is their goal today?</s>KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Christi, there's not a lot of hope, just to be blunt. Let me explain why. You mentioned that profanity riddled intro by President Trump to the meeting they had yesterday, and during that he suggested multiple times that he would not move from that $5.6 billion for the wall. We know Democrats are also not going to move, and not going to do any funding for the wall, so they are at a standstill here. But the other thing is, what authority does Vice President Pence actually have? That's a big question we are hearing here on Capitol Hill, because here is what we know. I'm going to take you back three weeks to when this government shutdown started. We know that Vice President Pence raced up here, he talked to Senator Schumer, and he made an offer essentially for $2.5 billion for the wall, one which, of course, Schumer rejected, again, saying no money will go towards the mall. But then earlier this week, you heard President Trump say no, there is no $2.5 billion offer. That's not on the table, it's only $5.6 billion, seemingly contradicting this offer that the vice president made. So there's a lot of questions as to how much authority Vice President Pence actually has, Jared Kushner has, as well as knowledge that what we've learned during this president's term is that he has the final say on all of this, that he is going to be the one that makes his stamp of approval or not. And we saw, what led to the shutdown, he had basically told Vice President Pence and his White House staffers that he would sign this legislation that the Senate presented to him that did not have border wall funding in it, only to change his mind at the last minute. So there's not a lot of hope and optimism going into the meeting, still at a standstill. But I do want to mention one thing, and this is the changing dynamic here on Capitol Hill. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, we'll all remember of course, right after the shutdown, he said Republicans aren't involved with this, this isn't our problem. Well, it is about to be their problem, because we know that vulnerable Republicans running for reelection in 2020, those senators, a lot of them are starting to speak out and say we need to pass something and we need to end this shutdown. So we will see how that plays out in the coming weeks. Back to you.</s>BLACKWELL: Cory Gardner and Susan Collins already on that list. Kristen Holmes there for us on Capitol Hill, thanks so much.</s>PAUL: CNN senior political analyst Ron Brownstein with us, senior editor at "The Atlantic" of course, and CNN political commentator Kevin Madden, Republican strategist with us. Gentlemen, thank you. So glad to have you both here. Ron -- I'm sorry, Kevin, I want to lead into you with that very question, wondering how cohesive the Republican party is now in this standoff for the shutdown.</s>KEVIN MADDEN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it depends on whether you're talking about in the House and the Senate. You do see some blue state Republicans starting to vote for Democrats, with Democrats on bills to reopen the government. Many of them have concentrations of federal government workers in their districts, so they have more incentive to see this thing come to a close. I think in the Senate one of the hard parts is that you mention Susan Collins, you mentioned Cory Gardner to Democrats, to Republicans in blue states, but you don't have the same high concentration of vulnerable Republicans there to really have a breakthrough in the Senate. And Mitch McConnell is just very good at keeping his conference linked with the White House now. So it is hard to see where we really have a big rush for the exits from Republicans here to really get a deal here. And that's why it is hard for me to see where the offramp is in this entire shutdown to begin with.</s>PAUL: Do you see an offramp, Ron?</s>RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, I agree largely with Kevin, and the reverse is true as well. Imagine this a decade ago when there were still a large number of blue dog Democrats from conservative rural and southern districts as part of the House majority. You would be hearing a lot of teeth-gnashing and concern among Democrats in the House about the president trying to portray them as soft on border security. You don't see that at all this time. In fact, Democrats are pretty confident. Looking at polls where a majority of the public has almost invariably in every poll taken in the Trump presidency has opposed the building of a border wall, including supermajorities of 60 percent plus among all of the groups that push them into control of the House. I don't really see them feeling a lot of pressure here. The moment for the deal that the president wanted he may have squandered last year, because at that point, and people forget that all but three Senate Democrats last February voted for a wall in return, $25 billion, not $5, $25 billion in return for legal status for the Dreamers and some other undocumented immigrants. But the White House killed the deal because it also demanded large cuts in legal immigration. I don't see Democrats going back to that. The Dreamers want no part of it. They don't want to be associated with the wall. And I think it is going to be very -- I don't think Democrats feel nearly as much pressure as the president hoped when this began.</s>PAUL: Well, I just want to mention the video that you just saw there. We said we are just about 40 minutes away from -- or 15 minutes away from the meeting, you just saw Vice President Pence and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen going into the building there as they're going to hold this meeting. And President Trump made it clear you cannot have one without the other. You can't have the wall and you can't have the money. They have to be connected. So Ron, I'm wondering, he went so far yesterday as to mention a national emergency.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Yes.</s>PAUL: Are you comfortable with the idea, and how many GOPers would be comfortable with the idea of bypassing Congress and taking money out of the military budget to pay for a wall?</s>BROWNSTEIN: Well, if you're asking --</s>PAUL: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Kevin, that's for you. I apologize. Kevin, that's for you.</s>MADDEN: I was like that's my question.</s>PAUL: Yes, it is.</s>MADDEN: Look, Christi, and Ron knows this, he has seen it too, partisan tribalism is a very real thing in Washington right now. So there will be folks who have always argued the principles of out of control -- argued against an out of control executive exerting its power against the will of Congress who will find a way to say sure, that's perfectly fine for this president to do. Why? Because he happens to wear the same jersey that I am wearing now. But the warning that I would offer to folks is before you start to have expanded views on executive power and broad authority of executive power, just remember this, that your party may not always be in the executive. But as Ron also knows, right, we see it all too often, people find a way to rationalize their hypocrisy, depending on who is in power.</s>PAUL: Ron -- go ahead. Go ahead.</s>BROWNSTEIN: In terms of the national emergency idea, it is worth noting that the best data we have on the size of the undocumented population is from Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan group. And their data shows that the undocumented population peaked in 2007. It is 1.5 million lower today than it was a decade ago. And the apprehensions on the southern border are a fraction today of what they were in the early 2000s. Obviously, any move to do this unilaterally through some sort of national emergency would face immediate legal challenge. And it's hard to imagine you would get an awful lot built while this was percolating through the courts.</s>PAUL: Real quickly, I just want to get both of your takes on this latest tweet from the president. "I don't care that most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats. I want to stop the shutdown as soon as we are in agreement on strong border security." Your reaction, Kevin?</s>MADDEN: Well, I think that from the way he frames it, it seems to have a lack of empathy, and I think that's one of the problems, too, is that it's sort of hurt the president's ability to have leverage in the debates, as well as lack of clarity. We talk about wanting to declare a national emergency. Well, I think that hurts your ability to negotiated when you're trying to tell the Democrats, by the way, it doesn't matter because I'm going to do it anyway. That hurts your ability to try and get more money for a border wall. So I think that just contributes to the overall chaos of these negotiations, and again, I don't see an end in sight right now as a result of that.</s>PAUL: Ron, I've got 15 seconds.</s>BROWNSTEIN: I think Kevin is absolutely right. And this could go on awhile because it is the collision of worldviews between a Democratic majority and a Republican -- in the House, and a Republican Party that are now more separated geographically and demographically than at any point in modern times, and those worldviews are now colliding right at the border.</s>PAUL: Ron Brownstein, Kevin Madden, I'm telling you, there are people home watching now and they're just wondering where their next paycheck is going to coming from and how they're going to pay their bills. Thank you both so much, always appreciate your insights.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Thank you.</s>MADDEN: Great to be with you.</s>PAUL: Hundreds of TSA employees calling out sick at major airports around the country. How this could impact airport security and your travel plans.</s>BLACKWELL: Plus Senator Elizabeth Warren is on the campaign trail, the first high profile Democratic to launch a White House run. How she's being received so far. We're live in Iowa.</s>PAUL: And a Texas community demands justice for the shooting death of this little girl, seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes. So is NFL star DeAndre Hopkins, what he is doing in Jazmine's honor. We have a live update for you from Texas ahead.