House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., isn’t a member of the bipartisan team of 17 lawmakers appointed to negotiate a critical border security deal, but she is poised to wield more influence over the outcome than anybody else in Congress. That will make it nearly impossible for President Trump to win money for a wall along the Mexican border.
Pelosi, who regained the speaker’s gavel in January after eight years sidelined in the minority, emerged more powerful than ever last month after the 35-day partial government shutdown that ended when President Trump signed a short-term spending deal without a penny for the wall.
Democrats were triumphant, and Pelosi in particular won praise for keeping her caucus unified against negotiating with Trump over the wall, even as the shutdown dragged on for weeks and its impact worsened.
“Nancy Pelosi is a bad ass, and she has kept the entire Democratic caucus in line through some very difficult times,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., told the Washington Examiner after the shutdown ended.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a victory-lap press conference told reporters, “No one should ever underestimate the speaker, as Donald Trump has learned.”
Pelosi’s power will make it difficult if not impossible for Republicans on the negotiating team to secure any real funding for a barrier on the border.
President Trump wants $5.7 billion for a steel-slat fence, but Pelosi scoffed at the proposal last week.
“There is not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” Pelosi said on Thursday.
Her statement clashed with the position of the bipartisan group of negotiators who met a day earlier for the first time in a basement conference room under the Capitol. The group pledged to negotiate without setting limits or taking anything off the table, including barriers along the border.
“Everything is on the table,” said Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the negotiating panel and the top lawmaker on the House Appropriations Committee.
The group has until Feb. 15 to work out a deal. That’s when the stopgap spending bill runs out and another partial government shutdown will begin without new legislation.
Republicans on the negotiating panel say the agreement on border security funding must include money for barriers in certain areas along the border.
“These strategic barriers comprise a comprehensive solution that is capable of fully securing the border,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the top GOP negotiator, said when the group met last week.
The offer from House Democrats, unveiled last week, includes money for port security and technology to detect illegal immigration along the border but nothing for barriers or a wall.
Pelosi said Thursday she’d consider funding for “Normandy”-style fencing along a 30-mile stretch of the border but nothing more. The style of fencing Pelosi endorsed is low and appears easy to climb over.
“If the president wants to call that a wall, he can call it a wall,” she said.
Pelosi’s strength comes in large part from a Democratic caucus that is, like her, mostly progressive-leaning. The once-robust “Blue Dog” coalition of moderate Democrats, who challenged her frequently in her first run as speaker, has been largely wiped out over the last decade.
The approximately 30 lawmakers who now make up the party’s diminished moderate coalition urged Pelosi last month to negotiate on wall funding. Pelosi, a master of understanding her own leverage in the caucus, didn’t budge.
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, a senior Democrat who represents a pro-Trump district in western Minnesota, said when he directly asked Pelosi during the shutdown to support some wall funding, “She just looked at me.”
