Deadlock: GOP majority fails to bring spending agreement
WASHINGTON — The federal government shut down early Saturday on the first anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration.
Republicans holding the White House and majorities of the House and Senate were unable to break a deadlock with Senate Democrats over a fourth stopgap spending bill since the fiscal year ran out last fall. The bill passed the House on Thursday but failed on a procedural vote in the Senate late Friday, 50-49, well short of the 60 votes needed to break a Democratic filibuster.
At the heart of the standoff is a failure by Republicans to fund the government through the regular
appropriations process, and a demand by Democrats to attach legal status for 690,000 young immigrants to an unrelated, must-pass spending bill.
The political fallout for both parties will escalate each day that the shutdown continues and the public experiences rising disruptions to government services. When the standoff will end is unclear, given the enormous gulf between the parties on immigration. The last government shutdown in 2013, with Republicans in control of Congress and a Democrat in the White House, lasted 16 days.
Shortly after the vote, the two party leaders, Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., delivered scathing rebukes to each other on the Senate floor.
McConnell proposed a new three-week deadline once Democrats “come to their senses.” He accused Schumer of making the “ridiculous argument that it made sense somehow to shut down the government over an illegal immigration issue.”
Schumer said he had offered Trump in an Oval Office meeting to consider money for Trump’s border wall and thought they were making progress, only to have the president back away within hours. “The blame should crash entirely on President Trump’s shoulders,” Schumer said, blaming Republicans more generally for sowing “chaos, disarray, division and discord.”
Five Democrats facing reelection this year in states Trump won broke party ranks to vote for the bill, fearing political repercussions from shutting down the government over an immigration issue. They included Sen. Doug Jones, whose victory last month in deep red Alabama became a cause celebre for national Democrats. But the defections remained well short of the 60 votes Republicans needed. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, both Democrats, voted no.
After a hastily arranged Oval Office meeting Friday afternoon, Trump and Schumer said they had made progress in negotiations but reached no resolution. Trump canceled plans to fly Friday to his Mar-aLago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., where he has a gala scheduled to celebrate his first year in office.
Four Republicans — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Rand Paul of Kentucky — also broke party ranks and opposed the bill. With the absence of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is battling brain cancer, Republicans’ already slim 51-49 majority was narrowed and they needed more than a dozen Democratic votes to pass the stopgap measure.
They fell far short of that. Jones was joined by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had earlier declared he would not vote to close the government, and three other Democrats who swung to the GOP side Friday: Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
Both sides spent the day trying to brand the other party with the shutdown, with White House officials calling it the “Schumer shutdown” and Democrats pushing the “Trump shutdown.” Both sides unearthed quotes and video clips from the last shutdown in 2013 to make their case, some showing Trump blaming former President Barack Obama’s failure to lead, and others of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, blaming GOP “legislative arsonists.”
Both sides said they abhorred a shutdown that would cost taxpayers an estimated $6 billion a week, furlough 850,000 government workers and force a million federal employees to work, albeit temporarily, without pay.
“The military will still go to work,” said White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. “They will not get paid. The border will still be patrolled. They will not get paid. Folks will still be fighting fires out West. They will not get paid.”
Schumer and Trump said their White House meeting, which both men’s chiefs of staff attended, was productive.
Trump tweeted about the “Excellent preliminary meeting in Oval with @SenSchumer” but, hours later, said things were “Not looking good for our great Military or Safety & Security on the very dangerous Southern Border. Dems want a Shutdown in order to help diminish the great success of the Tax Cuts, and what they are doing for our booming economy.”
But even if the stopgap House bill had cleared the Senate, it would have kept the government open only a month. Congress could well have found itself at the same donnybrook on Feb. 16 when funding would have run out again. And a stopgap bill would have kept funding at last year’s levels, without any of the policy changes either party wanted.
Steven Ellis, vice president of the budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, blamed Republicans for neglecting their most basic duty of enacting regular appropriations bills while pushing their marquis campaign promises.
“You spend the first threequarters of the year on repealing Obamacare and whiff, and then you spend the last quarter of the year on tax cuts, and all the while you should have been at least somehow doing appropriations,” Ellis said. “It’s not like this crept up on anybody.”
Democrats, for their part, calculated that the must-pass bill would provide their best leverage to secure legal status for the 690,000 young immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children and grew up as Americans. These immigrants currently are protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which Trump canceled last fall and gave Congress until March 5 to replace. The program could continue longer under a court order now in effect.
Months ago, California’s Harris, a potential presidential contender from a state where about a third of the DACA recipients reside, became one of the first Democrats to insist on tying the young immigrants to the spending bill.
Her party gradually followed, under pressure from the Democratic base and the young immigrants, who shouted down Pelosi in her own district last summer for not being aggressive enough on the issue. Harris and Pelosi both addressed a crowd of young immigrants protesting at the Capitol on Friday night, Harris telling them, “We are going to have to fight.”
California state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, a Democrat challenging Feinstein’s re-election bid this year, relentlessly goaded Feinstein to get on board, which she ultimately did.
But the strategy put 10 Senate Democrats running for re-election in states Trump won in a precarious spot. And it left Democrats in the position of killing a bill to fund the government, exposing them to blame for the shutdown.
McConnell said Friday that Schumer had led “his own troops into a box canyon.”
The White House, for its part, used Trump’s cancellation of the DACA program to open a new effort to shrink legal immigration, an anathema to Democrats. The White House rallied Republicans around a “four pillar” plan to restrict extended family visas and cancel the diversity visa lottery, as well as funding for physical border barriers that would fulfill Trump’s promise of a wall, in exchange for protecting DACA recipients.
Democrats had bowed to tougher border security, but they said GOP efforts to restrict extended family visas and the visa lottery are unacceptable. A bipartisan effort by six senators that made minor tweaks to both visa categories was dismissed by the White House as a nonstarter.
Although both sides refer vaguely to protecting the young immigrants, they frequently are speaking about widely varying numbers of people, from the 690,000 currently enrolled in the program to the 3.6 million who would qualify for protections under the Dream Act legislation Democrats have pushed. That bill, first introduced in 2001, would provide legal status for those who arrived in the U.S. before age 18 and maintained residence for four consecutive years and have a high school diploma or be enrolled in college, among other requirements.
For weeks, Pelosi and other top Democrats have studiously insisted that the disagreement is not over just DACA but also other budget issues. These include parity for increases in both military and domestic spending, currently constrained by budget caps imposed in 2011, authorization for the Children’s Health Insurance Program that expired in September and a long list of other items.
To entice Democratic votes, Republicans included a six-year authorization for the Children’s Health Insurance Program for low-income families in the spending bill. McConnell tweeted a chart framing the controversy as a choice between 8.9 million recipients of the children’s health program that “expires today” against protection for 690,000 DACA recipients that “expires March 2018.”