WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday asked President Donald Trump to postpone his State of the Union address or deliver it in writing, citing security concerns related to the partial federal government shutdown.
The suggestion, which could deny Trump an opportunity to make his case for border wall funding in a prime-time televised address, came as White House officials were urging Republican senators to hold off on signing a bipartisan letter that would call for an end to the government shutdown, now in its fourth week.
In a letter to Trump, Pelosi said the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security, both of which have key responsibilities in planning and implementing security for the scheduled Jan. 29 address in the House chamber, have been "hamstrung" by furloughs.
"Sadly, given the security concerns and unless government reopens this week, I suggest that we work together to determine another suitable date after government has reopened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing to the Congress on January 29th," Pelosi, D-Calif., wrote in the letter.
Trump did not immediately respond to the request, and the White House, thrown off guard by the move, had yet to offer any official response hours later.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that anyone's safety would be compromised, saying both agencies "are fully prepared to support and secure the State of the Union."
Democratic leaders did not ask the Secret Service if the agency would be able to secure the State of the Union event before sending the letter, according to a senior Homeland Security official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Pelosi's office said Congress is already familiar with the percentage of Secret Service and Homeland Security employees who have been furloughed or are working without pay.
The Secret Service starts preparing for events like these months in advance.
State of the Union addresses are traditionally made to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the invitation of the House speaker. The House and Senate must adopt a resolution to formalize the invitation, which has not happened yet this year.
The Constitution says the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But what is now a speech to a joint session of Congress in the Capitol has taken different forms over the years, including in writing for much of the 19th century.
Pelosi later told reporters that her letter was intended as a suggestion and that she was not rescinding an invitation for Trump to speak. She stressed that no address had ever been delivered during a government shutdown.
"We would have the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, the entire Congress of the United States, the House and Senate, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet of the United States, and the diplomatic corps all in the same room," she said. "This requires hundreds of people working on the logistics and security of it. Most of those people are either furloughed or victims of the president's shutdown. ... The point is security."
Pelosi added that Trump is welcome to deliver an address from the Oval Office.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called Pelosi's move "unbecoming."
"It is not a security issue -- that's politics. It's pure politics," McCarthy said.
"I'm worried about security, too," he said. "But I'm worried about security on the southern border."
ANOTHER HOUSE VOTE
Toward the end of the day, the House passed another stopgap spending bill to reopen the government without funding Trump's wall. As with previous such bills, the White House issued a veto threat.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., once again rejected the House's tactics in a Senate floor speech Wednesday, saying: "As the White House has made clear just yesterday, cherry-picking continuing resolutions that fail to address the border security crisis are not going to receive the president's signature. Not going to. The only way out of this impasse is a bipartisan agreement."
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., responded to McConnell's remarks with his own floor speech, saying: "I would say to the leader very simply, you may disagree with us, [but] open the government. Open the government. You can do it, Leader McConnell. And all your blaming and flailing isn't going to open the government. We all know Donald Trump is the obstacle here."
At one point in the day, several freshmen House Democrats embarked on a hunt for McConnell at the Capitol, leaving letters calling for an end to the shutdown at the majority leader's office, in the Senate Republican cloakroom, and in the Russell Senate Office Building -- holding impromptu news conferences along the way.
"Just vote. Vote yes, vote no, but vote. Do something," Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., pleaded outside McConnell's office.
"The leader has spoken publicly many, many times on holding show votes," McConnell spokesman Donald Stewart said in response, referring to McConnell's opposition to taking up the House-passed spending bills.
Meanwhile, senior White House officials were trying to tamp down any signs of division among Republicans as Trump remained unyielding in his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding.
A draft of a bipartisan letter in the Senate, obtained by The Washington Post, asks Trump to allow the government to reopen for three weeks "to give Congress time to develop and vote on a bipartisan agreement that addresses your request."
"We commit to working to advance legislation that can pass the Senate with substantial bipartisan support," the three-paragraph letter says. "This would include debating and voting on investments on the Southern border that are necessary, effective, and appropriate to accomplish that goal."
In calls to GOP senators placed after word of the letter became public late Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner made clear that the president is unwavering and would not support the letter's call to reopen the government, despite mounting concerns about the political cost of the shutdown for his party, according to a White House aide and three congressional officials who were not authorized to speak about the private discussions.
"The president sees this as a capitulation, and he's not going to walk away," the White House aide said.
But two other White House officials said Pence and Kushner have spoken carefully in these exchanges, knowing that the Senate may ultimately decide to act even if Trump is opposed to reopening the government.
Trump's resistance to reopening the government was echoed by several conservative senators on Wednesday, who expressed skepticism about the moderates' ability to persuade Trump and congressional Democratic leaders to agree to a deal.
"It's not the time to kick this down the road," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said of the prospect of reopening the government and continuing talks about border security. "Apparently this draft has some support, but it's the leadership that'll decide what to do."
Still, the moderates are moving fast to break open the stalled negotiations. The letter is being drafted by senators who took part in a bipartisan meeting earlier this week aimed at finding a way out of the shutdown.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., an ally of McConnell, said early Wednesday that he intended to sign the letter but that the timing and other signers remained in flux.
"I see it as a solution," Alexander said of the letter.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who has been urging Trump to reopen the government, said, "We just have to demonstrate that there's more than a couple people that want to do this."
Murkowski added: "We've got to get the president to support it. Without that, we're still stumbling along."
Schumer is being regularly briefed on the bipartisan group's activities and the count of senators on the letter, aides and lawmakers said, and has encouraged the group to pressure McConnell to act.
Others involved in the group include Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio, plus Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the GOP whip, said he "respected" the group's attempt to broker a compromise but that the president and leadership would ultimately decide how to proceed.
The House and Senate have announced that they are canceling next week's planned recess if no deal is reached to end the shutdown.
WHITE HOUSE MEETING
The new effort among some senators came as the White House invited a group of House Democrats and moderate House Republicans to meet with Trump on the shutdown for the second day in a row, this time members of the bipartisan "Problem Solvers" caucus.
White House officials described Wednesday's meeting with the House group as an attempt to contain the frustrations of moderates in both chambers and reiterate how the administration sees what's happening at the border as a crisis that necessitates a wall.
Unlike Tuesday, when Democrats rejected a meeting called by the White House, seven Democrats planned to attend Wednesday, but their goal, they said, was not to negotiate with Trump but rather to share the Democratic perspective.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the meeting "constructive" and said, "They listened to one another, and now both have a good understanding of what the other wants."
During the meeting, lawmakers told Trump that he must abandon his demand for funding for a border wall in exchange for reopening the government, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., said in a statement.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump lashed out at Democrats in a series of tweets, calling them "a Party of open borders and crime" and pointing to a surge in construction of border walls by other countries.
"It is becoming more and more obvious that the Radical Democrats are a Party of open borders and crime," Trump said in one tweet. "They want nothing to do with the major Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border."
"There are now 77 major or significant Walls built around the world, with 45 countries planning or building Walls," the president wrote in another tweet. "Over 800 miles of Walls have been built in Europe since only 2015. They have all been recognized as close to 100% successful. Stop the crime at our Southern Border!"
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for the source of Trump's statistics.
The figure of 77 walls has been previously cited by Elisabeth Vallet, a geography professor at the University of Quebec-Montreal and author of a book on border walls and fences.
According to Vallet, there were seven border walls or fences in the world at the end of World War II. By last year, that number had grown to at least 77, with many being erected after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
Democrats have said they are willing to negotiate over border security once the government is reopened, but they reject a wall as an expensive and antiquated solution.
Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner, Erica Werner, Robert Costa, Mike DeBonis, David Weigel, Seung Min Kim and Paul Kane of The Washington Post; by Catherine Lucey, Jill Colvin, Lisa Mascaro, Chris Rugaber, Darlene Superville, Matthew Daly, Jonathan Lemire, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman, Elana Schor and Ken Sweet of The Associated Press; and by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; and by Eli Stokols, Noah Bierman and staff members of the Los Angeles Times.
A Section on 01/17/2019