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In response to President Trump’s good-faith offer of a compromise to fully reopen the government, Democrats should stop playing puerile politics and instead play ball.

The president’s position was a major compromise even before Saturday’s speech to the nation, while the Democrats’ position before the speech contradicted many of their own earlier positions.

Trump long has said he wants to put a wall across the whole border with Mexico, a project costing $20 billion at the very least, but began these negotiations asking for just $5.7 billion for security including a partial wall. Leading Democrats, on the other hand, long have acknowledged that a wall across large swaths of the border would make sense. So their current position, that any wall at all is “immoral,” borders on hypocrisy.

Trump has long argued that any form of “amnesty” is a violation of sovereignty, so his offer of three years’ grace period for a full million currently illegal residents (in three categories) is a significant concession for him. Democrats who say they are horrified by the partial government shutdown should accept his deal — or at the very least make a major counteroffer going most of the way towards his $5.7 billion request.

The public is ill-served by politicians so eager to “win” against the other side that they refuse even to come to the negotiating table. This is especially true when many of those politicians have said in the past that walls across significant parts of the border are a good idea. The public needs to know that our system can work, that a workable “middle” can be found, that ideology can bend a bit for the sake of the public weal. If Democrats truly believe the public is being harmed because about 400,000 government workers are being kept from providing important services, and if they think legislative protections for a million immigrants are important, then they should be willing to pay a little for a partial wall they once supported.

One can believe (as I do) that there is no “crisis” at the border, that immigration policy in general is a problem but nowhere near as important as both sides (especially conservatives) say it is, and that a wall would be merely a moderately helpful part of a much larger necessary overhaul of immigration policy, and still see that it is the Democrats who are negotiating in bad faith while refusing to put government employees back to work. Trump for now has given up on three-fourths of his wall and offered three years of amnesty he clearly detests, risking fury from his own base — while Democrats have actually retreated farther from the middle and asked not a thing from their own hard-line ideologues.

When even a critic of Trump in general and in his specific conduct of the shutdown wars can see Democrats are the ones being much more obstinate here, the political tide may start turning in a way that buoys the president and Republicans in general.