Subject: Re: Trump: I Would Encourage Russia...
Uh, huh. If 5,000 was good enough, why not 1,000 or some other number? No, there was zero willingness to budge.

It could have been some other number. The bill was killed by Johnson even before these provisions were released - you don't know at all whether it could have been 4,500 or 4,000, if anyone really cared enough about that and it could have gotten the bill through. Or whether the number started at 8,000, and there was already a lot of "budging." Or whether everyone had picked 5K because it was a big round number, but were always willing in the back of their mind to trade it for votes. It certainly would have remained high enough that it wouldn't be met if asylum flow went back to levels where they could be processed by the new system (say, back to the levels during the Bush and Obama years), since there some pretty bad consequences to not allowing refugees to even apply for asylum at all. But it's almost certain that there would have been some wiggle room.

You have no idea whether there was any willingness to budge, because the process was killed before any back-and-forth from interests outside the negotiators took place. Johnson killed the bill, so McConnell stopped the Senate process, long before there was any horse-trading from outside the negotiating group.