Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the White House is now “flexible” on border wall funding. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo White House GOP talks Trump off the shutdown ledge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the government would stay open and that the White House would be ‘flexible’ on its border wall demands.

Mitch McConnell thinks he’s gotten President Donald Trump to back off his shutdown threat. And it’s looking increasingly likely to come with a short-term punt.

The Senate majority leader emerged from a lengthy party lunch after a flurry of mixed signals from the White House to declare there will be no partial shutdown on Friday evening, when a quarter of government funding expires. The GOP majority may have to settle for a short-term delay, but McConnell said the White House is now “flexible” on border wall funding, just one week after Trump said he’d be “proud” to shut down the government in a fight over border security.


“He can speak for himself. But I think a government shutdown is not a good idea. That’s my view. The American people don’t like it,” McConnell told reporters. Asked whether he believes a shutdown could now be avoided ahead of the holidays, he responded: “Yeah, I do.”

McConnell’s efforts to soothe an inflamed debate between the president and Democratic leaders capped a day of unsuccessful negotiations between McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a softening public position from the White House. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders indicated the president could accept less than the $5 billion from Congress that he had previously demanded, and Schumer did not rule out a short-term spending bill that would punt the border fight to next year.

Trump, of course, revels in the daily drama and, on Tuesday, refused to admit defeat or pledge that he would win the standoff. After McConnell and Schumer spoke to reporters, the president said he wants more border security and was coy on whether he'll sign whatever Congress sends him. “We’ll see what happens,” he told the news media.

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Back on Capitol Hill, senators and aides said they believed a short-term spending bill might be the best option.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby said Tuesday night that lawmakers were likely to pass a spending bill that would expire in “early February. It could flip a few days.”

“That would give the new Democratic House time to organize,” Shelby said. He said ultimately it would be up to McConnell and Trump, but acknowledged that was the most likely outcome.

Earlier Tuesday, McConnell suggested to Democrats that they pass the bipartisan Senate homeland security funding bill and its $1.6 billion for fencing plus an additional $1 billion in spending Trump could use on the wall, which Schumer deemed a "slush fund."

The Democratic leader soon called McConnell to reject the proposal and stood behind a bill offering flat funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which would provide $1.3 billion for fencing.

"The Republican offer today would not pass either chamber," Schumer told reporters. He said his caucus would "very seriously" consider a short-term spending bill, which would thrust a spending fight into the lap of presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the beginning of the new Congress.

The round of failed talks followed a key breakthrough: Sanders admitting publicly that Trump would take less than $5 billion in border wall funding from Congress as a condition for keeping the government funded. She said on Fox News that the administration would work with Hill leaders on passing a bipartisan bill providing $1.6 billion in fencing and would try to move more money around within the government to fund the border wall. Schumer said he would withhold congressional approval for that.

Later, Sanders told reporters the White House was "disappointed" the Senate hadn't sent it anything. But she also underscored that the White House was waiting on lawmakers to act. “When they do something, we’ll make a decision about whether we’re going to sign it,” Sanders said.

And party leaders are clearly preparing to make a move given the new wave of negotiations among Schumer, McConnell and Pelosi.

Some Senate Republicans signaled after the party lunch that they might try to force Democrats to reject their proposal, arguing Democrats might be bluffing.

“Nancy Pelosi is balking because she doesn’t know if she has got the votes for speaker next year,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). “Seems to me we need to make members vote in both houses on what they’ve already agreed to essentially.”

Others said a short-term spending bill might be the only option.

“Our goal would still be to a long-term agreement, but if not, and if it’s a short-term CR, then we’ll see what can ride on that, and what the president will sign,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.).

Even with the partisan bickering and lack of a firm solution, Sanders’ statement was a breath of fresh air to Republicans after all of Trump’s shutdown talk last week.

“The emphasis on the desire to not have a shutdown is a major plus,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who struck the initial border compromise.

Since Trump’s televised Oval Office sparring match with Democratic leaders a week ago, the White House has careened between a hard-line position and indications it is preparing to give in to Democratic demands. The result has been utter confusion on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have waited for a clear sign from the White House about what sort of bill the president would sign.

Indeed, Sanders’ remarks came 48 hours after the White House sent Stephen Miller, the administration’s leading immigration hawk, to serve as the White House’s spokesman on CBS, where he said Trump was prepared to shut down the government if he didn’t get the wall funding he was seeking.

“We're going to do whatever is necessary to build the border wall to stop this ongoing crisis of illegal immigration,” Miller said.

Sanders, however, suggested the White House is open to cobbling together a series of funding bills that together would amount to $5 billion in border security and wall funding — something that the president would spin as a victory, according to a White House official.

“It’s not to anybody’s political benefit to shut the government down right now, so I think the likelihood of some concessions are very high,” said a former White House official.

White House aides stressed that the president is aware that a shutdown would dominate cable news headlines over the Christmas holiday, when he is planning to decamp to his Mar-a-Lago resort and when there is unlikely to be much more in the way of political news to overshadow it.

Trump had 30 minutes of “policy time” scheduled with Mick Mulvaney, his budget chief and soon-to-be acting chief of staff, earlier Tuesday and was also scheduled to meet with top aide Kellyanne Conway.

Sanders did not say in her Fox News appearance where the additional border money would come from to reach Trump's full $5 billion demand, but administration officials have hinted it could come from the military's budget.

The president has suggested as much in a tweet, writing, “If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall. They know how important it is!”

Trump is still haunted by regrets over signing a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill last March that included $1.3 billion for fencing but fell far short of his initial demands. After signing the bill into law, Trump was stung by the critical reviews it received on Fox News, which blasted the president for allowing major increases in domestic spending without extracting painful concessions.

“I personally wish the president vetoed this bill, made them stay in Washington. Make them keep their promises,” Trump pal Sean Hannity said on his prime-time show. “What happened to the Republican Party? Whatever happened to the party that believed in fiscal responsibility?”

In the weeks that followed, the president told aides he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice and even floated the idea of pushing a so-called rescission bill in order to claw back as much as $60 billion included in the original bill.

Still, lawmakers were relieved after the White House signaled it was preparing to back down and some sort of endgame began to take shape.

“I don’t know anybody on the Hill that wants a shutdown, and I think all the president's advisers are telling him this would not be good,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.

“I’m starting to feel like a combination of Christmas being right upon us and people’s desire to go home makes it feel like it’s all coming together here," he added.

John Bresnahan and Brianna Gurciullo contributed to this report.