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Vice President Mike Pence spent his weekend meeting with congressional staffers, supposedly over finding a path forward to end the partial government shutdown. That Pence, whom Trump has already cut off at the knees as a negotiator, is meeting not with members of Congress, but with staff shows just how dug-in Individual 1 is on continuing this shutdown.
So is the fact that they're upping Trump's demands. They've gone from $5 billion for the wall to $5.6 billion and now to $5.7 billion, "for construction of a steel barrier for the Southwest border," and then tacked on "an additional $800 million to address urgent humanitarian needs" and unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the border.
They provided no information, says a Democratic official, "about how the money would be used or why the request is for so much more than the administration sought only a few months ago." Their concession to Democrats is to make the wall out of steel rather than concrete.
Meanwhile, the sheer incompetence of the Trump administration is becoming clear. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is scrambling to keep thousands of people from being evicted after it was caught up short by the expiration of one HUD program on January 1. It didn't know that this program was expiring and that it wouldn't be able to renew it in a shutdown. HUD spokesman Jereon Brown says that budget and contract staff are now "scouring for money" to try to meet the contracts on an interim basis.
IRS and Treasury are trying to figure out how they're going to send out tax refunds in the next months, and the Interior Department is potentially breaking the law by diverting funds from one program in the National Park Service to keep the parks open and safe and save them from vandalism. At least seven people have died in the unstaffed national parks since the shutdown began, "including a man at Yosemite National Park who illegally brought his dog on a trail and subsequently fell."
All because Trump's weak brain and outsized ego were manipulated by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and the Freedom Caucus maniacs into changing his mind about the deal worked out before Christmas and passed by the Senate. And because Mitch McConnell refuses to bring that same bill he passed last month and that the House passed last week back to the floor.