post. moderator of washington week on pbs. kimberly atkins, washington bureau chief for the boston herald and an msnbc contributor and jill colvin, white house reporter for the associated press. good evening and welcome to you all. hey, robert, there is a deeply cynical scenario circulating in washington tonight that calls for the following events to happen. president flies to the wall tomorrow, declares the state of emergency that was not in his speech last night. some folks saw the white house counsel has been manifested for the air force one flight. wondered why he d need a lawyer for the trip. state of emergency gets kicked immediately to the courts. the president s able to say to his base look at me, i declared this a state of emergency after all. senate votes, government reopened by the weekend. your thoughts. at this point talking to white house officials tonight it is true the new white house counsel will be traveling with
democrats, is that in most of them live in washington dc, they happen to be democrats that don t support him. even though the facts don t back that up, in fact we know that most federal workers, 79% of them live outside of the dc area. lots of them live in parts of the country that supported donald trump. there is lots of farmers that won t get those subsidies if the shut down stretches beyond this coming week. there is hundreds of thousands of people who are directly or indirectly affected by the shut down. partisan politics does not play into it. is it a possibility that the president declares a national emergency and tries to appropriate funds for his wall tomorrow. he could but we re not expecting him to do that
as senator schumer said earlier this afternoon, there will be and yesterday as well, there will be no wall today, no wall tomorrow, and no wall on january 3rd, when the democrats take the house majority. joel payne who do you think has more leverage here? is it democrats or republicans? if you think it is republicans at all, is their time very quickly running out? i think democrats have the leverage. here s what i would also say, the idea that the president cares about the issue of immigration or this is a passion project for him. the only passion project for donald trump is donald trump. this is all about 2020. this is all about base politics. he knows this issue whips up his base. he s on a war footing for 2020. this is an opportunity for him to get pem like ann coulter and rush limbaugh radicalized and representized for 2020. in fact he is even radicalizing the senate. you have flake and, coulder who are leaving. corey gartner, susan collins are