Trump: Senate should change rules if shutdown continues
Democrats and GOP point fingers over stalemate
WASHINGTON (Los Angeles Times/ TNS/Reuters) – US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that if the government shutdown stalemate continued, Republicans should fund the government by changing Senate rules, which currently require a super-majority for appropriations bills to pass.
“The Dems [Democrats] just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked. If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% [Nuclear Option] and vote on real, long term budget,” Trump said on Twitter.
Trump’s proposal was almost immediately rejected by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Senate Republicans oppose changing the chamber’s rules so that legislation to fund the government and end the current shutdown could pass with a simple majority, the spokesman said.
“The Republican Conference opposes changing the rules on legislation,” the spokesman said in an email.
Current Senate rules require a super-majority of three-fifths of the chamber, usually 60 out of 100, for legislation to clear procedural hurdles and pass.
Funding for federal agencies ran out Saturday with Trump and Republican lawmakers locked in a standoff with Democrats. There appeared to be no clear path for a quick end to the crisis.
Democrats say short-term spending legislation must include protections for illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, known as “Dreamers.” Republicans, who have a slim 51-49 Senate majority, said they would not negotiate on immigration until the government was reopened.
With elections set in November for a third of US Senate seats and the entire House of Representatives, both sides are maneuvering for the shutdown.
Democrats have grown used to winning political face-offs over government shutdowns, smiling from the sidelines as Republicans struggled to contain the unruly factions in their party. On Saturday, Democrats got a taste of that stomach-churning game.
On the first day of the partial government shutdown – the last one was in 2013 – Democrats were playing a risky strategy, caught between a rising activist base that demands protection for young immigrants and moderate lawmakers who fear taking the blame as iconic sites like the Statue of Liberty were closed and an estimated 800,000 federal employees faced the prospect of unpaid furloughs.
Both sides furiously blamed the other for the impasse, which is unlikely to end before Monday, and both sides faced considerable political danger as they gear up for midterm elections this fall that could swing according to how long the shutdown lasts – and who the public views as responsible.
Democrats say they are confident as they stare down an unpopular president and a Republican Party, which controls both chambers of Congress. They say voters will blame the party in power for what they called the “Trump shutdown.”
But Democrats may have more to lose than the already unpopular Republicans if the dysfunction lingers. Republicans pointed the finger at Senate Minority leader Charles E. Schumer, for what they labeled the “Schumer shutdown.”
“With Trump’s approval in the doghouse and the GOP struggling to get things done, attention turns and focuses on the Democrats as obstructionists rather than the Democrats standing for principle,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University.
Democrats said they are determined to negotiate a deal that includes some protection for about 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children. Trump canceled the Obama-era program of deferred deportations for the so-called Dreamers last year.
Party centrists worry that tying the fate of undocumented immigrants – even those who grew up as Americans – to a bill to keep the government open could prompt a backlash from voters and kill their hopes of retaking Congress next fall.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers huddled among themselves, convened a rare weekend session and traded phone calls with White House officials. But they offered no promise that they could quickly undo the shutdown, which began when a midnight deadline expired and government funding lapsed.
Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, scheduled a vote that, under Senate rules, could be held no sooner than 1 a.m. Monday, to provide a three-week spending bill in hopes of forcing enough Democrats to fold before the work week begins. The vote could be moved up to Sunday if senators agree.
“Let’s end this foolishness,” McConnell said as he opened the chamber at noon.
But as he and Schumer tried to hatch a plan that could win 60 votes in a bipartisan deal, Republicans took turns blaming Senate Democrats who led a filibuster Friday that halted a House-passed funding bill that would have continued operations through February 16. HOUSE MAJORITY leader Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican, accused Democrats of holding a “tantrum” because they did not get what they wanted in the House bill. “We did our job,” argued Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
But Schumer said dealing with the Republicans has been like an old Abbott and Costello comedy routine, with GOP leaders sending him to talk with Trump at the White House, and the president pushing him back to Republican leaders.
Schumer said he thought he and Trump had made a deal to protect Dreamers and provide more money for a wall along the Mexican border, Trump’s priority, only to have the president abruptly change course.
“Negotiating with the White House is like negotiating with Jell-O,” Schumer said.
The calendar also is a factor. Trump is scheduled to deliver his first State of the Union address to Congress next Tuesday, and both sides are trying to leverage that date to gain concessions.
Trump was forced to cancel a weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront resort in Florida, that included a lavish political fund-raiser on Saturday night – in which a pair of tickets started at $100,000 – to celebrate his first year in office. If the shutdown lingers, he may have to cancel a planned trip on Thursday and Friday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
During the last government shutdown five years ago, Trump called President Barack Obama’s inability to keep the government open a failure in presidential leadership. On Saturday, the White House blamed Democrats for Trump’s inability to do so.
“The president will not negotiate on immigration reform until Democrats stop playing games and reopen the government,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
The effects of the shutdown are limited over the weekend, when most government offices are closed.
The Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums in Washington and New York and the National Zoo stayed open. The nation’s military will stay on duty, although service members’ pay may be delayed, and key veterans’ services could face disruption. The White House said Saturday that about 90,000 National Guardsmen and 20,000 Army Reservists had their training canceled.
Barclays estimated that each week of a shutdown shaves 0.1 percentage point from quarterly economic growth. But because it is early in the quarter, the economy could make up for some, or all, of that loss before the end of the quarter, especially if the shutdown is brief.
Democrats were urged to hold firm by immigrant advocacy groups, who said they were assured that party leaders would use their leverage in the budget fight to get a deal to protect the Dreamers.
Erika Andiola, a Dreamer activist and former press secretary to Sen. Bernie Sanders, tweeted her thanks to Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for “holding the line.”
“We count on you to keep holding it until we win the Dream Act and the government opens again,” she said.
Democrats have assumed that the Republicans’ hold on the White House and Congress, combined with Trump’s erratic negotiations, would insulate them from blame for a government shutdown. Many early polls vindicated that strategy, showing most Americans would blame either Trump or GOP congressional leaders if the government were forced to close.
But those surveys were largely taken before House Republicans rallied their most disruptive members to pass a stop-gap measure in their chamber Thursday. That measure was blocked in the Senate on Friday, mostly by Democrats who prevented Republicans from reaching a 60-vote threshold needed to hold a vote.
Dreamers are extremely popular in polls, with large majorities of Americans eager to grant them legal status.
Yet in a CNN poll released Friday, 56% of Americans said keeping the government open was more important than protecting the Dreamers, compared with 34% who said it was more important to continue the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows Dreamers to work legally without threat of deportation.