of a democratic congress would be to abandon the preferences of the people that established their majority on something as which is as of a line in the sand as the wall seems to be utterly incredible and it is why the white house until recently recognized they really had no way forward on this demand. david swerdlick, i mean we may be going into a situation in the beginning of the year where they hand the gavel to nancy pelosi, she becomes speaker of the house and the government is still shut down over all of this. that s right. what will change on january 3rd is democrats will take control of the house. the president s statement you read there was a high word-to-content ratio, but what he seemed to be saying if you boil it down was that it will be status quo, anti in the senate. he wants to put pressure on charles schumer, minority leader, to make a deal because he still will be the minority leader. what changes in the power in the house, and he is saying incoming speaker pelosi
role, but wouldn t be the first civilian to occupy that position maybe. the president is happy with him, is happy with him going forward, but when you look at the larger pattern, here is a president having difficulty filling some of the positions because, listen, you could very easily find yourself out of those positions if you get on the wrong side of the president. that s a risk they would have to take. we certainly know that. he s been an acting defense secretary, acting attorney general, acting chief of staff and so on. thank you very much. joining me congressman john garamendi, a democrat who serves on the armed services committee. as you saw today, the president visiting troops in iraq, i suppose better late than never. he said, we ve knocked out isis, they ve been knocked out, they ve been knocked out silly. what did you make of the president s comments when you saw him make thoise comments today. he said that the u.s. could use iraq as a base to launch attacks against syria,
necessary. it had daca, it had immigration reform, it had border security, it had drones, it had walls, it had improved ports of entry. all of that was in it. unfortunately, speaker bainer and the republicans in the house refused to even take that issue up. since that time the democrats have repeatedly said that we will support border security. we will support all of these elements including fences where useful. now, the president has yet to describe any plans whatsoever as to where he s going to build a wall or the fences or the spiked steel rails. none of that has been given. we would not allow the military and i m on the armed services committee, responsible for this to even build a garage for their tanks unless they told us where, when, why it was needed and how much it would cost. then we would appropriate the money. so when the president says he will have the military build the wall for him down on the border, your response to that then?
white house blew up that deal because they insisted, as you know, jim, on adding the lastest cuts to legal immigration since the 1920s as a gesture towards the most, i think, nativist elements of the republican base. i mean that is the backdrop here. the reality is that the president is using a tactic that is historically very unpopular, schulting down t shutting down the government, if advance of a cause, building the wall, that has never attracted majority support as far as i know in any poll that has been taken in the trump presidency. in fact, in the last cnn poll only 38% of the country said they support building the wall. only 33% said they supported building it if mexico was not going to pay for it. particularly noteworthy of the president s comments, at least 60% to 65% to 70% all of the groups, young people, african-americans, college-educated whites, opposed the wall. the thought that the first act
have to have people on the ground. that is what will not happen. the u.s. will not have people on the ground. they ve done air strikes from iraq before into syria, but, you foe, this is when isis was really a formidable, very visible force. that is not what they are today. the intelligence will be very tough to collect. and, jim sciutto, the syria withdrawal has been described as sudden, made after turkey s president pushed for it over the phone. as you know, we have all been covering this. how are these national security decisions being made? i mean you hear the president today saying, well, we can always strike isis from iraq. the way it was described to me by a senior administration official is they re made on a whim, on a phone call. and the evidence we had of that was this official told me that in the weeks prior to this surprise decision, that john bolton, of course the president s national security adviser, dispatched senior officials to meet with partners, allies on the gro