been there long enough, i don t see an end in sight, i don t see this getting better, nothing is changing, we ve got to bring our men and women home? you re absolutely right. and in the past you had people on the republican side known as neocons who seemed to believe in forever war. they wanted to keep our troops there forever without a sort of clear notion of where this was going. and certainly in syria the president can be forgiven in looking at the issues there and saying well, wait a minute, we re trying to get regime change, we re trying to get rid of bashar al assad, and at the same time we re trying to go after one of his main enemies that is isis. does this really make sense? are we really going to close this deal? let s work on isis and let s simply let others work on bashar al assad. that would have been a sensible issue. he could have said to his military commanders, look, i want a strategy that gets us out of there but does not create a
republican-controlled house and a republican-controlled senate and he did have a deal on the table. it seems like the reason he s got no deal now has more to do with him than it does with anybody in congress. well, i d also tell you there was a federal court ruling that reinstated daca which took the leverage off the table in terms of the fact that it needed to be done. if that gets overturned i think that deal comes back and there may be something long term in that respect. but also as you know while, yes, technically republicans do control the senate, when it comes to senate appropriations you re going to need 60 votes, so you have to have democrats on board. they re using that minority power to hold up the entire spending process. i do know that. but he did have 20 billion on the table and he decided to say no to it because he added some more components to a deal that he wanted that he wasn t going to get. he had a republican deal, a bipartisan deal on the table that was thrown
they have continuing strikes, air strikes against forces in syria, isis, because of the enduring threat and it s clear he didn t listen to defense secretary jim mattis. who he is listening to i think as we start drawing circles and circles it gets closer to the president s listening to himself on this. we can t find anyone within the administration who is actively talking about withdrawing from troops in syria this quickly in the way the president did. and that s the new reality going forward. in a lot of ways, katy, it s similar to what happened with kim jong un. this is a president that wanted to have a summit. he wanted to go toward a deal. and he hurtled toward that deal. now, whether or not that deal s going to be final and lasting is an entirely different matter. katy? you know, howard, white house officials have been asked who the president is listening to. and they won t name somebody either. if he s not listening to his generals and he s not listening to advisers and congres
committed for the past three years from the campaign trail all the way through his time in office. he wants to secure the border. that includes that includes a wall or fencing or whatever we re going to call it now. and he wants to see that included. so basically, until he gets his way? well, that s both ways. you ve got democrats saying they won t pass any kind of cr if it has any money for the wall. they want their way. the president wants his way. hopefully, there will be a way to meet in the middle so far. but what we ve heard is that anything over the 1.6 or 1.3 billion, that number keeps changing, is a non-starter for democrats and the president is trying to make a broader deal on and he s offered this on multiple occasions. we ll just have to see how it comes out. well, there was a deal to be made last year when he was being offered 20 billion in his wall in exchange for protections for daca. he threw that deal in the trash. and now it s two years later when the democr
deal with donald trump on this. this isn t a deal. there s not a negotiation in which democrats would get a political priority of theirs like protections for the dreamers, for example. it s merely the baseline of keeping the government open. that s not a democratic priority. that should be a priority of the whole of government. to the degree democrats are getting pressured, it s from their left, from progressives, saying don t make this deal, we don t want this medieval wall. he i say there s perhaps one wrinkle. i heard from a democratic source of mine a long time ago that democrats can t help but try to good afternoon even when it s not their job expect and the argument here would be that in a republican-controlled washington which we are still in until the first week of january, this should by all accounts be republicans problem to fix. but democrats have a tendency-a a constitutional tendency sometimes to try to insert themselves into problems that are not technically theirs to so