Catie Edmondson

Keep up the fight.

That is the message they are getting now.

Well, that's right.

And to hear these Democrats tell it, they're saying, look, if you're going to say that you're using this shutdown to lay off federal workers, well, you were already doing that before the shutdown happened.

You actually already did that back in March when I, as a Democrat, voted to keep the government open.

So why should I vote to reopen the government now?

Michael, I think that had already happened before the shutdown.

I think the shutdown has sort of twisted the knife even more in sort of this wound in regular appropriations, if you will.

I mean, look, I went and talked to a Senate Republican who is on the appropriations committee.

is a chairman, and I asked him, look, there's a real trust deficit right now between Democrats and your party, between Democrats and the White House.

Is there anything that you can do to try to give some sort of assurance that in the future, when Republicans and Democrats on the Hill come to some sort of a probes deal, that the White House is not going to unilaterally try to undermine it?

What can be done?

And his response was, well, I don't think the president would approve any of those safeguards.

And so we're not going to have the votes for it here on the Hill.

So we're just going to have to work through that.

Exactly.

And that was a sobering thing to hear from someone who sits on the Appropriations Committee.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, I think it depends on what the deal looks like.

Democrats are banking on President Trump's instinct of wanting to make a deal, wanting to protect his party from devastating health care attack ads in the midterms.