President Donald Trump’s budget chief said Sunday the government shutdown could last more than a week — and defended the president’s call for a “nuclear option” to break the impasse.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney accused Democrats of being more interested in optics than policy.
“I think Democrats want to see the president give the State of the Union under a shutdown,” he said, adding however, “negotiations are continuing on ending the shutdown and “there’s a chance it gets solved before Monday.”
Trump’s first State of the Union is scheduled for Jan. 30.
In a separate interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mulvaney also defended Trump’s tweet supporting the Senate use a so-called nuclear option to pass a government funding bill.
“We've been critical of that 60 vote rule since the president took office,” Mulvaney said. “He tried to shed some light on the fact [that] if ordinary rules prevail the government would be open as of today… We cannot open the government without” Democrats’ support in the Senate.
Mulvaney added that Democrats are talking about ”a very complex… massive spending bill with a lot of other things added to it” and “that’s not going to get done between now and tomorrow morning and now and next Friday.”
“So the government needs to be open. They need to vote to open the government tonight or tomorrow and then we can start talking about those bigger issues.”
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