Michael Gold

Republicans sent a deal, like they said, we're going to fund everything except for immigration enforcement.

But that deal doesn't have any of the new restrictions that Democrats said that they needed in order to agree to fund the rest of the department.

And so Democrats sent their version of the deal, which doesn't actually look that different from the first version that they sent five weeks ago when we started this.

It has all their demands on immigration enforcement.

It has all these requests that they've made at the White House and things that they said the White House already agreed to that Republicans are suddenly pulling from their offer.

So right now, we're in the middle of a heated negotiation with a lot of back and forth.

And I think when you're talking about Congress, it's kind of important to remember two things.

There's the paper.

There's the text.

There's the thing that's being exchanged.

And then for lack of a better word, there's the vibes.

And so right now, both sides are saying, well, we don't really have a deal.

They're not agreeing.

They're not agreeing.

But the energy around here is that everybody is really trying to find a way out of this.

And it looks like they're going to move closer.

It's just a matter of how long that takes.

Yes.

The argument that Democrats made when they saw that Republican offer is that it did not do anything they'd asked for.

And that if they agreed to it, they would, on the one hand, not be voting to fund ICE, which is very important to them.