we had last week, and in the words of the wedding singer perhaps that could have been brought to my attention on friday. this is high stakes stuff. in this news cycle, yes, people may forget faster. you have to convince your base, look, it was really important that we stood up and fought, but also nobody else should blame us and we didn t really get anything but it was righteous. that s what ted cruz tried to do in 2013 and it didn t work. the reason democrats are folding their cards as quickly as they are, if they do go ahead and vote to reopen the government, the strength across the caucus was never very strong. i was speaking to a democratic senator this morning, part of the central caucus, and it was clear from our discussions that he wasn t going to hold out even for a few more days, never mind weeks and months. there was never a clear exit strategy for democrats if they had any reasonable hope of achieving anything. that s why i think you re seeing
it is only yanked back by staff members. as long as steve miller is in charge of negotiation, we are going nowhere. he has been an outlier for years. there is a deal to be had. so both the criticism of the white house leadership, and at the same time, senator graham was trying to sound optimistic that it looks like senate leadership can come to terms, can get government up and running again even if it means a commitment about dealing with immigration later. there are a couple of points worth mentioning here. the first is both sides need an exit strategy here. if you look at the current polling it has been very consistent that more people are blaming donald trump and the republicans than the democrats. it s also pretty clear that a government shutdown is not a powerful enough lever to make a president do something he doesn t want to do. i covered the obama shutdown and
they will need to fulfill that job may be delayed. that s where we will see those effects. the president has been tweeting and he is not at all upset the government is shutdown. he thinks he tagged schumer with the shutdown. and he said he is not going to negotiate on daca even though there is an obvious deal that 80% of the country agree that daca recipients stay. the president will not be pushed into a corner, he said. so what is the exit strategy? how long is this going to go on? who is calculating their benefiting right now? that s kind of why you start to see the outlines of this agreement early this morning on late last night and early this morning on the senate floor as that exit strategy. it is far from clear whether house republicans and house democrats would go along with it. that s a question we are going to be asking lawmakers later this morning. but i think the fact that the
either. it s difficult to see what people oppose in the build. the give 9 million children health insurance and delay some obamacare taxes that are unpopular and keep the government open while they can negotiate some of these other issues. so it is an interesting issue. i ve talked to some senators in the hall wales and scratching their heads trying to figure out the exit strategy. they re talking to one another across the aisles and saying what do you want? bottom line is the american left is on fire about immigration and wants an immigration deal now. we ve seen a lot of activists on capitol hill this week hollering for a deal for the 800,000 or so dreamers. the republicans are countering saying the deadline for the dreamers isn t this weekend. the deadline to fund the government is this weekend. the deadline for the dreamers is not until march 5. there is more time to negotiate. the bottom line is the left in this country is saying we want it now and a lot of democrats are respondin
that role in the senate. what you didn t hear from him and what i think is important here is what the off-ramp is here, what s the exit strategy, what s the fix if the president won t come to the table. he said there s not language yet on a bill he and dick durbin are working on. perhaps that s what that phone call is about. there s not language for a bill. he doesn t sound like he s on board even with the alternative idea of a short-term continuing resolution to force an answer to this crisis in four or five days. what you heard there was lindsey graham saying we need to get it done right now in the next 12 hours and we need the president to lead on it. i think that s interesting. you know as well as anybody, we talked about on the show, lindsey graham likes to talk to the president through television. there s a message there. isn t that interesting? if he likes to talk to the president through television and there s lindsey graham repeatedly talking about steven miller, steven