President Donald Trump indicated Wednesday that he would meet with the top congressional Democrats ahead of the looming government funding deadline, but said he didn’t believe it would go well.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are currently away from Washington, D.C., in their respective districts and states, but the Sept. 30 deadline to prevent a partial government shutdown will be just a handful of weeks away when they return after Labor Day.
And there is a brewing tension between Republicans and Democrats over just how the looming government funding fight will shake out.
Trump, during a press conference where he announced a slate of Kennedy Center honorees, said he would meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., before the deadline.
‘But it’s almost a waste of time to meet, because they never approve anything,’ Trump added.
‘I don’t believe anybody is capable of making a deal with these people,’ he continued. ‘They have gone crazy.’
Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer and Jeffries for comment but did not immediately hear back.
Lawmakers must pass the dozen spending bills needed to fund the government to avert a partial shutdown, but that process, known as regular order, has not happened in decades.
While Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has made clear he wants to pass spending bills, and the Senate did indeed pass a trio of funding measures before leaving town, Congress will likely again turn to a short-term government funding extension, known as a continuing resolution (CR).
However, any CR must pass muster with Senate Democrats, given that the legislation has to pass through the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshold.
And congressional Democrats have a bitter taste left in their mouths after Republicans rammed through Trump’s $9 billion clawback package, which included deep cuts to NPR, PBS and foreign aid. They warned that any more attempts to claw back congressionally approved funding on a partisan basis could doom government funding negotiations.
Ahead of the vote to pass three spending bills in the Senate, which included funding for military construction and Veterans Affairs, agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the legislative branch, congressional Democrats vowed that they would play ball – as long as the appropriations process was bipartisan.
‘We all want to pursue a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations process,’ Schumer said at the time. ‘That’s how it’s always been done, successfully, and we believe that, however, the Republicans are making it extremely difficult to do that.’
Earlier this year, Schumer briefly flirted with a government shutdown. However, he eventually relented and voted with Republicans to keep the lights on in Washington, and in the process ignited a firestorm within his own party over his ability as leader of the Senate Democratic caucus.
