She said it ever so subtly, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made clear this past week she is ready to compromise on border funding.

She will not do it, though — she cannot do it — unless she is given a way to save face.

"There's not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” she said. “However, if they have some suggestions about certain localities, technology, some infrastructure ... that's part of the negotiation."

Pelosi did not directly propose a “fence” instead of a “wall,” but she implied nearly as much. "There's 600 miles of something,” she said. “Three hundred miles of them are Normandy fences. If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall. ... So, again, if there's a place where enhanced fencing, Normandy fencing, would work? Let them have that discussion."

Pelosi went from there to discuss the cost-benefit analysis of border barriers, implying that a fence would be cheaper and more efficient than a wall.

She may be right, and on some parts of the border, very right. Meanwhile, President Trump is right that a country has a right to control its borders, which in many cases will involve a wall or physical barrier.

Democrats are under a lot of political pressure to prevent Trump from coming out of this debate with anything resembling a win. They were, after all, elected to oppose him. And many Democrats (not all, but including Pelosi) have gone so far as to make the idiotic argument that a border wall is immoral. That’s rather a stretch, considering the hundreds of miles that already exist, which Democrats voted for not long ago, but that’s where we are today.

The last thing the nation needs is another major government shutdown. In order to prevent it, both Pelosi and Trump need to negotiate within the realm of reason. They need to work for a deal instead of repeating what they did in round one — working to avoid a deal so as to break their respective counterpart.

Trump needs to negotiate for something that lets Pelosi walk away able to say she succeeded — “ no new wall” — while still allowing the construction of barriers at the border, whatever we want to call them. A particular need, based on the Border Patrol’s account, is to fill in between the existing segments of wall — er, fence — that are already scattered throughout South Texas along the Rio Grande.

If either side insists on total victory — on pulverizing and humiliating the other side — then we’re heading for another shutdown, and this time, the party that brings it on should expect to blamed.