Bitter bickering muddies path to negotiation.

WASHINGTON — With the federal government one day into a shutdown, the House and Senate reconvened Saturday for a new round of bitter partisan bickering and public posturing that seemed to cloud the path to a resolution despite initial talk of a compromise.

The shutdown unfolded one year to the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the political peril it risked for both parties was evident as they traded blame for the crisis.

The Senate met for a rare weekend session at noon — less than 11 hours after it adjourned — and an exasperatedsounding Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, took the floor. “Well, here we are,” he declared. “Here we are. Day 1 of the Senate Democrats’ government shutdown. We did everything we could to stop them.”

He went on to point a finger at his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, saying that Schumer had created an “unfortunate hostage situation and led his party into this untenable position.”

Schumer, in turn, blamed McConnell and Trump.

“He’s turned blowing up bipartisan agreements into an art form,” Schumer said of the president, adding that “negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O.”

In the House, the proceedings at one point were interrupted by a dispute over whether a poster of Schumer, placed on an easel as a Republican lawmaker gave a speech denouncing Senate Democrats, was appropriate for display on the floor.

The likeliest route for lawmakers to reopen the government is to agree on a stopgap spending measure that stretches longer than the few days that Senate Democrats want, but shorter than the four weeks that the House approved Thursday.

But agreeing on the length of the stopgap bill — essentially, a matter of circling a date on the calendar — is complicated by a number of contentious issues that lawmakers have yet to resolve, particularly the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, known as Dreamers, brought to the country illegally as children.

In an ominous sign for those who had hoped for a quick resolution, Trump’s campaign released an ad Saturday saying that Democrats who stand in the way of cracking down on illegal immigration “will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” While the government is closed, the White House is against entertaining immigration demands.

“The president will not negotiate on immigration reform until Democrats stop playing games and reopen the government,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, who late Friday night described Senate Democrats as “obstructionist losers.”

McConnell is proposing to shorten the temporary spending bill so that it would expire on Feb. 8 instead of Feb. 16. Senate Democrats did not immediately get on board with that idea, but McConnell said he would move ahead with a procedural vote on the proposal at 1 a.m. Monday, unless Democrats allowed it to be held sooner.

A bipartisan group of roughly 20 senators, who call themselves the Common Sense Coalition, met Saturday afternoon in the office of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to forge a compromise. Members said they were working on various proposals to present to McConnell and Schumer, with the hope that they would talk to each other.

“We’re going to have to go back and reassess and try to give people a landing spot, a place where everybody feels like they can save a little face and at the same time move forward with getting government running again,” said Sen. Michael Rounds, R-S.D., who participated.

The Senate was scheduled to convene at 1 p.m. Sunday, and the House at 2 p.m. Several members said they worried that if the shutdown dragged on, people on both sides would dig in, making it harder to come to terms on substantive issues like the fate of the Dreamers.

“There is no defense to what we’re doing,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who also participated in the meeting.