Democrats are starting to flex a little on “barrier” funding — just don’t call it a wall

WASHINGTON — If reaching a deal on border security was tough before this week’s State of the Union address, it didn’t get any easier after President Trump blasted Democrats and rallied his base with a fearmongering case for the wall.

“Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards,” the president said as Democrats of all stripes sat seething. “Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration.”

And yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appears to have softened her stance from last week when she said "there's not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” which sounded like a bright red line.

Asked Wednesday if she’d put an agreement that did include border wall funding on the House floor, she denied Democratic leaders had ever drawn a line. “I don’t think we did at all. I said I will support the bipartisan agreement that comes from the Appropriations Committee,” Pelosi told VICE News, referring to the group of 17 members of Congress negotiating the deal. “Left to their own devices, if they have a bipartisan agreement, I will support it.”

Many rank-and-file Democrats say the president’s State of the Union crippled his chances of winning wall funding. “I think he undermined his cause, because on the one hand he had this lofty rhetoric about the need for bipartisanship, and on the wall he was as divisive as ever,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told VICE News.

But the 17 congressional appropriators negotiating the deal say they’re still confident of reaching an agreement by Friday, the unofficial deadline to forge a compromise and get it printed so both chambers of Congress have time to digest it and vote on it by the official Feb. 15 deadline. If they miss the mark, there will likely be another partial government shutdown.

“I think we can get there,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told VICE News just off the House floor Wednesday. “There are certain people who are going to say, ‘We want $5.7 billion for a wall’ — it’s not going to happen. That’s off completely. Can we put billions of new dollars — don’t ask me how many — but into technology, personnel, you know? Yeah, there’s ways.”

Republicans involved in the talks say they’re confident they can walk away with some kind of “barrier” funding.

“I think the foundations are there for the legislation. It’s a matter of plugging in the right figures,” Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), a member of the panel, told VICE News upon leaving Wednesday morning’s closed-door conference committee meeting. “It’s going to be comprehensive. I cannot see anything coming out of conference committee that does not include barrier funding.”

To many on Capitol Hill, the problem has never been with the appropriators charged with forging the deal; the impasse has always been with the nation’s two most powerful party leaders and their respective bases.

“The problem is not the people inside the room; the problem is the people outside the room,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told VICE News in the Capitol. “The speaker and sometimes the president lay down lines — and look, they don’t know what’s happening in the negotiations in an intimate way, so they should just let these guys do their job. They’re pretty good at getting there.”

The president’s top allies on the Hill are urging the president not to put too much stock in the committee’s final product, because, they argue, he can just move funds around to build the wall.

“Everything around here is a tradeoff. Hopefully we can get a decent number, and whatever is not sufficient for the president, he can go out and get the other money on his own,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told VICE News while walking underneath the Capitol.

That’s why Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and three other freshman progressives are asking for strong language to be included in the Department of Homeland Security funding bill that would restrict Trump from easily shifting money around to build the wall. They also want the agency’s funding capped — not increased, as has been debated for months.

“I don’t think we give a dime more to DHS. I think that we have to impose much more watchdog measures on it,” Ocasio-Cortez told VICE News while walking across the Capitol grounds. “I think that we need to eliminate the transferability [of funds] within the agency so that they aren’t able to even consider measures like looting disaster funding in order to finance for-profit, private detention centers.”

And freshman progressives aren’t the only ones opposing any wall funding after Trump’s primetime address.

“It was fear-mongering, and, frankly I found it tragic that a president of the United States didn’t understand that we’re a nation of immigrants,” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) said of the president’s State of the Union. “Those people are desperate. They’re running away from their countries because the places are unsafe, and they’re bringing women and children. He just lied about the statistics.”

The conference committee, made up of all senior appropriators who regularly avoid sticky political issues in order to keep the government running, say they’re making progress, even if they won’t say what that progress looks like just yet.

But now Democrats are even more angry than they were during the historic shutdown, because the president used the politics of fear in his quest to fulfill a campaign promise of a big wall stretching from sea to shiny gulf.

“I think so. I absolutely think he did,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I don’t think it served his cause.”

Cover: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., walks with reporters to a Democratic Caucus meeting the morning after President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)