Will he or won’t he? Not even GOP lawmakers, WH staff seem to know
If Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees hall of fame catcher, was around to gaggle with reporters at the White House or in a Capitol hallway about the ongoing border security spending and government shutdown drama, he would likely note that it feels “like déjà vu all over again.”
Washington has entered a time warp of sorts as President Donald Trump and his top aides tiptoe up to the edge of declaring he will sign a bipartisan compromise package that would hand him $4.3 billion less for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall than he has for months demanded. By Wednesday morning, it became increasingly difficult to be sure whether it was December 2018 or February 2019.
From parsing Trump’s lukewarm reaction to a border security bill that Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer called “the last train leaving the station” to senior White House officials sending up tepid signals of their boss’s inclination to sign it to members of his own party practically pleading with him to do so, only the lack of holiday season decorations around Washington make clear this is the sequel rather than the original.
View the complete February 13 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.