Senate (thanks, Rand) blows shutdown deadline

The federal government shut down at the stroke of midnight after Sen. Rand Paul blocked his fellow Republicans from passing a spending bill late Thursday night.

Paul’s objections forced the upper chamber to adjourn until 12:01 a.m., causing at least a temporary halt to federal government services.

The Senate, however, still could consider a two-year budget deal in the early-morning hours Friday.

Sensing that his colleagues were going to pass the deal over his objections, Paul (R-Ky.) blasted his own party on the chamber floor — comparing his fellow Republicans to President Obama.

“I ran for office because I was very critical of President Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits,” he said. “Now we have Republicans hand in hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I can’t, in all honesty, look the other way.”

Paul voted in favor of President Trump’s tax reform, which is projected to increase the deficit by at least $1 trillion.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Paul’s actions Thursday night were “effectively shutting down the government . . . for no real reason.”

“I don’t know why we’re burning time here,” he groused. “It makes no sense to me.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) also ripped Paul, and said, “We can right now provide certainty to people who expect government to be open or we can play this game until 1 a.m.”

Tillis said Paul shouldn’t have sought to derail the budget unless he had convinced “51 or 60 senators that your idea is good enough to support.”

“You can make a point all you want, but points are forgotten,” Tillis said.

“There aren’t a whole of history books about great points in the US Senate.”

The deal under consideration would hike defense and domestic spending by more than $400 billion and raise the debt limit.

Paul had demanded a vote to restore budget caps that limit congressional spending to those enacted into law in 2011.

If the Senate were to pass the bill, it would still have to head to the House, where Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said he had the votes to pass it, despite stiff opposition from fiscal hawks in his own party, as well as from liberal Democrats.

The Senate deal would provide $70 billion for disaster relief for Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, which are still recovering from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, respectively; $20 billion for infrastructure; and $6 billion to fight the opioid epidemic.

President Trump took to Twitter to urge Congress to pass the plan.

“Republicans and Democrats must support our troops and support this Bill,” he wrote.

The bipartisan Senate deal was hammered out by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

In the House, many Democrats remain dubious because the bill does not offer relief to Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, who were protected from deportation by Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump rescinded last year.

Their permission to stay starts expiring on March 5, and about 700,000 Dreamers would then be in legal limbo.

But the administration has said that deporting Dreamers would not be a priority.