Report: House Dems were pressuring Pelosi to compromise before Trump gave in

Yet Trump’s fold came at just the right time for Pelosi, who presides over a caucus filled with anxious centrists and freshmen desperate for any signs of progress that the stalemate — the longest shutdown in U.S. history — was ending. While a vast majority of her members supporter her strategy through and through, several dozen started feeling restless…

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The ultimate test for Pelosi came after Trump’s surprising gesture last Saturday to offer Dreamers three years of non-deportation status in return for border-wall funding. While Democrats just one year ago shut the government down trying to protect those very undocumented immigrants, Pelosi pre-empted Trump’s nationwide address by panning the idea entirely even before he took the podium.

That move angered some of Pelosi’s more moderate rank-and file members. They fretted that her immediate rejection of a compromise — and refusal to counter Trump’s offer — would make them look obstinate to constituents who just needed to pay their mortgages.

Rep. Kurt Schrader, a centrist Blue Dog from Oregon, publicly expressed the private fears of several rank-and-file Democrats earlier this week — that his party lost the messaging war over the weekend by flatly turning Trump down.

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