BARBS TRADED OVER U.S. GOVT SHUTDOWN
Republicans, Democrats accuse each other for failing to pass stop-gap measures
WASHINGTON D.C.
UNITED States lawmakers launched a lastditch bid yesterday to end a budget impasse before hundreds of thousands of federal workers are forced to start the work week at home with no pay.
The impact of the shutdown that began at midnight on Friday has been limited, closing sites like New York’s Statue of Liberty, but the effect would be acute if the stalemate continued.
Republicans and Democrats have traded bitter recriminations over who is to blame for the failure to pass a stop-gap funding measure by a Saturday deadline, a year to the day since Donald Trump took office as president.
Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell on Saturday set a key vote for a funding measure for 1am today, with both houses of Congress expected to reconvene.
At the heart of the dispute was the thorny issue of undocumented immigration.
Democrats had accused Republicans of poisoning chances of a deal and pandering to Trump’s populist base by refusing to fund a programme that protects 700,000 “Dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who arrived as children — from deportation.
Trump, in return, said Democrats were “far more concerned with illegal immigrants than they are with our military or safety at our dangerous southern border”. The shutdown’s effects, meanwhile, were set to intensify.
Essential federal services and military activity continued, but even active duty troops would not be paid until a deal was reached to reopen the US government.
There have been four government shutdowns since 1990. In the last one in 2013, more than 800,000 government workers were put on temporary leave.
A deal had appeared likely on Friday afternoon, when Trump, who had touted himself as a master negotiator, seemed to be close to an agreement with Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on protecting Dreamers.
But no such compromise was in the language that reached Congress for a stop-gap motion to keep the government open for four more weeks, while a final arrangement is discussed. And, Republicans failed to win enough Democratic support to bring it to a vote.
Congress reconvened for a rare Saturday session, where leaders of both sides were meant to hammer out their differences to prevent the shutdown from continuing. Instead, they traded accusations of responsibility for the shutdown.
Schumer said trying to negotiate with Trump “was like negotiating with Jell-O”.
“It’s impossible to negotiate with a constantly moving target,” he said. “Trump is so mercurial, it’s been impossible to get him to agree to anything.”
McConnell said Schumer “took the extraordinary step” of preventing the legislation from passing and, thus, “plunging the country into this avoidable mess”.
Republicans have a tenuous one-seat majority in the Senate, and, on Friday, needed to lure some Democrats to their side to get a 60 vote supermajority to bring the motion forward. They fell ten votes short.
The measure brought to Congress would have extended federal funding until Feb 16 and reauthorised for six years a health insurance programme for poor children — a long-time Democratic objective.
But it left out any action on the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals programme, known as DACA, that affects Dreamers.
White House officials insisted there was no urgency to fix DACA, which expires on March 5. AFP