Now for the real deal -- what is a 'wall'?
Welcome to the eye of the hurricane.
For more than a month, the federal government was in partial shutdown while President Donald Trump and congressional leaders were deadlocked over the president's demands for money to build his long-promised border wall.
Neither side would budge and all the wiggle room for negotiation, particularly over the stickiest issue, Trump's proposed wall, had been squeezed out.
Then suddenly on Friday afternoon, Trump announced a deal to make a deal. After a 35-day impasse, the longest partial shutdown in U.S. history, the government would be reopened and back pay released to some 800,000 federal workers, if only for three weeks.
After that, what? Risky as it is to make predictions about this most unpredictable presidency, I believe the past offers clues to where this wagon train is heading: into a debate, I believe, over what is meant by "a wall."
Contrary to popular belief promoted by President Trump and his allies in this deeply partisan divide, Democrats have never opposed "border security." Over the past decade alone, the Democrats have voted for billions of dollars in funding for physical barriers.
In 2006 the Secure Fence Act passed with bipartisan support to construct physical barriers along 700 miles of the almost 2,000-mile Mexican border.
It won the votes of current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama -- who said it would "certainly do some good" and "help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country."
Bipartisan majorities voted to fund physical barriers in 2006, 2013 and even last year.
After the failure of President George W. Bush's comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007, enter candidate Trump to inflame the issue in 2015 by describing immigrants in the country illegally in terms of menace.
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