White House: Senate Dems ‘blinked’ in shutdown negotiations

The White House on Monday said Senate Democrats “blinked” in negotiations by voting to reopen the government.

“I think the fact that they’re voting in favor of this proposal that they had rejected a few days ago is sort of evidence that they blinked,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said on CNN.

The Senate voted Monday, 81-18, to end a three-day government shutdown and advance a stopgap funding measure that will last until Feb. 8. Roughly 30 Democrats voted to reopen the government after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promised to allow an immigration bill to come to the floor next month. 

{mosads}Several potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 voted against the measure, including Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.).

Democrats had initially rejected a stopgap measure and demanded that a funding bill include assurances to address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that benefits hundreds of thousands of so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

Shah said Trump maintains any immigration bill should address DACA, the visa lottery system, family-based migration and money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Those are still the points and the contours of a deal that this president would be open to, that he wants to hear from and he wants to get, again, a bipartisan group in Congress around that deal,” Shah said. “Now those negotiations were going on before the shutdown. Frankly all the shutdown did was delay those negotiations for a few days.”

Shah added the immigration bill proposed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is “not a proposal the president can sign.”