Pelosi Rejects Trump’s Shutdown Deal Before He Announces It

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Democrats reject President Trump's shutdown tradeoff in advance

Before he went public with his “major announcement” on Saturday, Democrats began shredding Trump’s proposed deal to end the US government shutdown

Nancy Pelosi rejected President Trump’s shutdown deal before he even opened his mouth to speak.

The House speaker called it “a non-starter” five minutes before Trump was to address the nation.

RT reports:  Pelosi, basing her statement on “initial reports” about Trump’s plan, said it represents “a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed her stance shortly after Trump laid out the details of his plan to reopen the government, now almost a month in shutdown.

Trump said that he was offering a “common-sense compromise” by proposing three years of legislative relief for 750,000 DACA recipients, young adults who illegally arrived in the US as children, and a three-year extension of stay for 300,000 migrants with temporary protected status.

Apart from the $5.7bn wall, the proposal also included a host of measures to beef up border security and fend off drug traffickers, such as recruiting an additional 2,750 border agents and allocating $800mn in urgent humanitarian assistance, and $805mn to combat drug trafficking.

Under the plan, the government would also hire 750 more immigration judges to better cope with massive backlogs.

Helping DACA recipients is one of the main focal points for the Democratic Party’s pushback against Trump. But unlike in the Trump deal, they want wide-ranging amnesty for illegal child arrivals, rather than temporary relief. Blasting the proposal, Schumer said that Trump “keeps putting forward one-sided and ineffective remedies.”

“It was the President who single-handedly took away DACA and TPS protections in the first place – offering some protections back in exchange for the wall is not a compromise but more hostage taking,” he stated.

While the harsh rebuke from the Democrats was rather predictable, there have been some dissenting voices among hardline conservatives, though congressional Republicans overwhelmingly sided with Trump.

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