Congress ends three-day shutdown
Senate Democrats buckle under pressure
WASHINGTON: Congress brought an end to a three-day government shutdown on Monday as Senate Democrats buckled under pressure to adopt a short-term spending bill to fund government operations without first addressing the fate of young unauthorised immigrants.
The House quickly approved the measure — which will fund the government through Feb. 8 and extend funding for the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years — and President Donald Trump signed it on Monday night.
The agreement also revealed fissures among Democrats, with about one-third of the party’s members in the Senate and a majority in the House voting against it.
The passage of the measure ended an ugly, if short-lived, impasse that threatened to give a black eye to both major political parties. The deal, reached after a bipartisan group of senators pushed their leaders to come to terms, enables hundreds of thousands of federal employees who had been facing furloughs to go back to work.
But a key part of the deal, a pledge by Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to allow an immigration vote in the coming weeks, sets the stage for a battle over the so-called Dreamers, young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are offering drastically different visions of how to resolve their fate.
But those on both sides of the debate, as well as advocates for immigrants’ rights, said that ultimately Mr Trump would need to get involved for the immigration dispute to be settled.
Mr Trump’s intentions were hard to discern, even as he took time to jab at the Democrats.
“Big win for Republicans as Democrats cave on Shutdown,” the president said on Twitter about 11.30pm Eastern time.
The message continued: “Now I want a big win for everyone, including Republicans, Democrats and DACA,” referring to the “Dreamers,” “but especially for our Great Military and Border Security. Should be able to get there. See you at the negotiating table!”
The vote in the Senate was lopsided: 81 senators voted to end the shutdown while 18 — two Republicans and the rest Democrats and an independent who caucuses with them — sided against the measure. In the House, the vote was 266150, with about three-quarters of Democrats opposed.
The measure also shored up the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, which insures nearly 9 million children. States had warned that they were on the verge of having to end coverage after Congress allowed funding for the programme — which had been created and sustained for two decades with bipartisan support — to expire in September.
The votes came after a weekend of fevered negotiations by a bipartisan group that eventually grew to include about 25 senators, who helped put together a framework in which Democrats would vote to reopen the government in exchange for the promise from Mr McConnell.
An apparent turning point came when Mr McConnell took the Senate floor on Monday morning to announce that he would ensure a “level playing field” on immigration — language that some Democrats interpreted as going further than he had before.
Mr McConnell said he would have the Senate take up immigration legislation by mid-February if the issue had not been resolved by then.