This is a rush transcript from "Special Report with Bret Baier," January 21, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I want this to end. It has got to end now. These are not talking points. These are the heartbreaking realities.

REP. TOM MALINOWSKI, D-N.J.: Remember, we had a deal in December when we thought the president was asking for $1.6 billion for border security and we gave it to him, Republicans and Democrats.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS, D-CALIF.: We were literally singing Christmas carols on the floor of the United States Senate. That was the mood, there was an understanding that we were going to do the right thing, and that the government would do the right thing. But the president refused to sign it.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: The president is offering a solution, and what we have from Democrat leadership so far is just soundbites.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BRET BREAM, ANCHOR: Let's bring in our panel, Chris Stirewalt, politics editor here at Fox News; Mara Liasson, national political correspondent for National Public Radio, and Charles Hurt, opinion editor for The Washington Times. Welcome all of you.

OK, so Charlie, before the president even made his big announcement that was coming on Saturday afternoon, my inbox was full of emails from Democrats saying, no thank you. They didn't know the contours of it, but they had some guesses. And once they saw the actual deal, they still were not interested.

CHARLES HURT, WASHINGTON TIMES: It is kind of like the State of the Union address. I think we call that the pre-action.

BREAM: The pre-action.

HURT: Prebuttal.

BREAM: Prebuttal.

HURT: The prebuttal. But no, if you actually -- when you sat and listened to what President Trump offered, it was actually a legitimate deal. He didn't win the White House by promising what a lot of people on the right are now calling amnesty with this DACA deal. He didn't really run on any kind of DACA extension either. So the idea that he has not actually giving an awful lot in this, I'm not particularly in favor of a DACA deal. But the idea that -- if it wound up getting something like the security that he's talking about at the border, that is a pretty good deal. A lot of people may not like it, but that's the nature of compromise.

So the idea that Democrats are going to sit on the sidelines and pooh-pooh this even before it all comes up, that is a real problem. The thing is that this week we will see a vote in the Senate, and we will see whether this proposal, however they write it, gets filibustered led by Democrats. If that is the case, I think that the dynamics of the entire shutdown start to change a little bit. Suddenly it's less Donald Trump's fault the little bit more recalcitrant Democrats.

BREAM: Mara, the polling consistently to this point shows that Republicans in Congress and the president are taking the blame for it. Whether it translates into 2020, that hasn't been the case in the past historically.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Historically someone loses the shutdown. Sometimes that loss, that political loss is short-lived. We saw Republicans lost a shutdown, then the Obama website crashed and nobody remembered the shutdown.

But what I think you are going to hear Democrats talk about soon, and I think that they should, is their vision of border security. They can't just say you have to reopen the government before we talk to you at all. Over time that is an untenable position. So I think you will hear them talk about their vision of border security which is different than the president's vision.

The president has to come out of this with some amount of money for a wall so that he can claim that he succeeded. The Democrats need to get something so that they can claim that they succeeded. I don't think that a three-year extension and deportation relief for the Dreamers is enough for Democrats. Maybe path to citizenship for the 700,000, not the 1.8 million who are eligible, something like that. We don't know what Donald Trump is willing to take the wall other than $5.7 billion, but I do think that this is the beginning of real negotiations. Even though it doesn't look like there are any now, this is --

BREAM: There has to be a counteroffer at some point, Chris, other than, as Mara said, it's going to be untenable. If months go by, you can't say until you open the government, we're not going to have any conversations at all. But when you talk about pathway to citizenship, it's something I've talked to folks on the Hill about. Folks like Jim Jordan, that is going to be a no-go for them.

(LAUGHTER)

BREAM: There's going to be a group of people who consider that amnesty.

LIASSON: The president tweeted, amnesty, he actually said amnesty is what we're going to be talking about --

BREAM: Right. He said that's not what we're talking about right now.

LIASSON: Yes, but he did say we're going to be talking about it.

BREAM: But there's a group that is not going to vote for that, Chris.

CHRIS STIREWALT, FOX NEWS POLITICAL EDITOR: There's 30 or so Republicans in the House that aren't going to vote for anything. So, period, they're a hard no. And by the way, no is always the easiest answer in Washington. No is always the easiest. No, I won't do it, I won't do it. I'm not getting everything I want, so no.

And Nancy Pelosi is a bind, and the reason that she's in a bind is that the president has made something that sounds like a counteroffer. There is starting a discussion here. The "Washington Post" editorial page saying, look, it's time, you have to talk turkey here. But everybody is still avoiding the basic construct. It is the space between $1.6 billion and $5.7 billion. That is all we are talking about. Everything else is the phony baloney. Do you want to spend the additional $5.7 billion or do you want to spend an additional $1.6 billion? It is almost like -- just hear me out on this. It's crazy talk, but it's almost like they could meet in the middle at a compromise number between them. I don't know, that is pretty far out there.

LIASSON: Some of that stuff is not just flummery. The Dreamers are not flummery.

BREAM: When you have the speaker, though, saying $1, you are joking about even $1, that's a different conversation.

LIASSON: It's the same thing with the president saying, OK, I'll take the shutdown, it's on me. I'll do it forever. This is just posturing.

BREAM: OK, so let's talk about the fact that we have a new 2020 contender officially in, Senator Kamala Harris. And there's been a lot of talk about how this conversation about the shutdown, the 2020 effect on that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

FORMER NEW HAMPSHIRE GOVERNOR JOHN SUNUNU: They are really all looking at 2020, trying to make sure that they get a Democrat president in 2020.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, I-VT.: Instead of building a wall with Mexico, let us build the housing our people need.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS, D-CALIF.: He is now holding the American people hostage over a vanity project that he calls a wall.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BREAM: Charlie, I've heard the word "hostage" a lot in the last 48 hours. It has clearly become talking points.

HURT: Yes, yes, absolutely. And of course, Chris is exactly right, this proposal that Trump made puts Pelosi in a difficult position. The person who is in an even more difficult position, of course, is Chuck Schumer, who has all those people who are running also happen to be in the United States Senate, or more of them are. And he's going to have to keep them corralled throughout this process.

And obviously they are playing to their base right now and running on this issue, but do you know who else has a really good hand in terms of politics is Donald Trump, because even when you get down into the specific groups of people, whether they're Democrats or whatever, there's broad support for doing something about the border and fixing the problem at the border. And Trump very much sees that as a winner going into 2020.

LIASSON: But not for the wall. If this is a debate about border security, Trump wins. If it's a debate about the wall, the Democrats win.

STIREWALT: That's correct. And by the way, Harris -- I'm giving it away, the halftime report today calls her the frontrunner. She is. I think she is the Democratic frontrunner. Joe Biden could change that, but she is making the biggest ripple in the pond right now. And for her in the United States Senate, just as our esteemed colleague Charles says, this is a good platform, but it keeps you in a tight box because you have to always be thinking about your primary run, and for here, she is going to take a lot of heat from the left because she was tough on crime as a prosecutor and as attorney general in California. So she is worried about her left flank a little bit. She's going to do everything she can with this and everything else.

HURT: And you saw where she was asked about that today, or yesterday, and she said --

BREAM: The death penalty.

HURT: Yes. And she said I take responsibility for all the decisions that got made, but I didn't make those decisions.

(LAUGHTER)

BREAM: All right, we're going to leave it there.

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