President Donald Trump won’t sign “everything” Democrats “put in front of him” — and another partial government shutdown is “technically still on the table” if there’s no compromise on border security, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mulvaney said “there’s going to be a lot of different moving pieces so I’m not in a position to say the president will absolutely sign or will not sign” a funding bill from Congress.
“The president has to sign a piece of legislation in order to keep the government open. He cannot sign everything they put in front of him. There will be some things that simply we couldn’t agree to,” Mulvaney said.
“So the government shutdown is technically still on the table. We do not want it to come to that, but that option is still open to the president and will remain so.”
If House and Senate negotiators don’t reach a long-term spending by Friday, funding will lapse for many federal agencies and another shutdown will be triggered.
Mulvaney also compared the congressional Democrats to Tea Party opposition to former President Barack Obama — and said it’s not reasonable for Democrats to try to legislate while conducting investigations of Trump.
“The difference between [when the Tea Party opposed Obama] and now is that so many of these Democrats got here by saying they wanted to reach across the aisle and they wanted to work with the president,” he said.
“It's not reasonable to expect the president to work with you on Monday on a big infrastructure bill and then on Tuesday have you punch him in the face over 15 different investigations.”
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