Senate sets up showdown votes on shutdown plans
WASHINGTON – Senate leaders on Tuesday agreed to vote on dueling proposals to reopen shuttered federal agencies this week, forcing a political reckoning for senators grappling with the longest shutdown in U.S. history: Side with President Donald Trump or vote to temporarily end the shutdown and keep negotiating.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy. set up the two showdown votes for Thursday, a day before some 800,000 federal workers are due to miss a second paycheck. One vote will be on his own measure, which reflects Trump’s offer to trade border wall funding for temporary protections for some immigrants. It was quickly rejected by Democrats. The second vote is set for a bill approved by the Democratic-controlled House reopening government through Feb. 8, with no wall money, to give bargainers time to talk.
Both measures are expected fall short of the 60 votes need to pass, leaving little hope they represent the clear path out of the mess. But the plan represents the first test of Senate Republicans’ resolve behind Trump’s insistence that agencies remain closed until Congress approves $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. For Democrats, the votes will show whether there are any cracks in the so-far unified rejection of Trump’s demand.
Democrats on Tuesday ridiculed McConnell’s bill, which included temporarily extended protections for “Dreamer” immigrants, but also harsh new curbs on Central Americans seeking safe haven in the U.S.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., said the GOP plan’s immigration proposals were “even more radical” than their past positions. “The president’s proposal is just wrapping paper on the same partisan package and hostage taking tactics,” offering to temporarily restore programs Trump himself tried to end in exchange for wall funding, Schumer said.
McConnell accused Democrats of preferring “political combat with the president” to resolving the 32-day partial federal shutdown. He said Democrats were prepared to abandon federal workers, migrants and all Americans “just to extend this run of political theater so they can look like champions of the so-called resistance” against Trump.
McConnell’s bill largely reflects the proposal Trump described to the nation in a brief address Saturday. It would reopen federal agencies, revamp immigration laws and provide $5.7 billion to start building his prized border wall with Mexico – a project Democrats consider an ineffective, wasteful monument to a ridiculous Trump campaign promise.
Republicans posted the 1,301-page measure online late Monday. Its details provoked Democrats, particularly immigration provisions Trump hadn’t mentioned during his speech.
The measure would provide a three-year extension of protections against deportation for 700,000 people covered by the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Democrats want far more to be protected – Trump last year proposed extending the safeguards to 1.8 million people, including many who’d not yet applied – and want the program’s coverage for socalled “Dreamers” to be permanent.
Trump has tried terminating the Obama-era DACA program, which shields people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, but has been blocked so far by federal judges.
The GOP bill would revive, for three years, protections for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua who fled natural disasters or violence in their countries. Trump has ended that Temporary Protected Status program for those and several other countries.
Democrats have refused to negotiate until Trump reopens the government. Trump is worried Democrats won’t agree to a wall compromise if he relents, while Democrats say Trump would use the shutdown tactic again if it works.
“If we hold the employees hostage now, they’re hostage forever,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., said.