HOW THE TRUMP STOLE CHRISTMAS!
Shuts down government over wall to put coal in stockings of 800,000 workers
It’s a Christmas tragedy.
A large chunk of the federal government shut down at midnight Friday after senators were told to go home when upper chamber Democrats firmly rejected spending any taxpayer money on building President Trump’s long-promised border wall with Mexico.
The debilitating holiday weekend shutdown that took effect at midnight complicates the lives of roughly 800,000 federal workers and came after Trump and Republicans refused to entertain any spending bill that didn’t include at least $5 billion for a wall.
In a video posted to his Twitter account at 9:49 p.m. Friday, Trump blamed Democrats for denying the money for a “great barrier.”
“We’re going to have a shutdown,” Trump said in the video. “There is nothing we can do about that, because we need the Democrats to give us their votes.”
He added: “The shutdown hopefully will not last long.”
Earlier Friday, Trump told reporters that the shutdown “is really the Democrat shutdown,” even though at the moment Republicans control both houses of Congress. That contradicted his earlier statement Dec. 11 that he would be “proud to shut down the government” over the wall.
“We’re totally prepared for a very long shutdown,” Trump told reporters Friday.
The House passed a bill late Thursday that tucks away $5.7 billion for a border barrier and general border security, but that didn’t have nearly enough support in the Senate, where all 49 Democrats were unanimously against using any taxpayer cash for a project they deem rooted in racism, not national security.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), nonetheless, forced the House bill to a procedural vote Friday.
The procedural passed with the help of a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Pence, but McConnell needed 60 votes for the bill to actually pass — a virtual impossibility.
A Senate debate in the hours before the midnight deadline was mostly symbolic, as senators were told they could head home and reconvene at noon Saturday, a Democratic aide told the Daily News.
The House, meanwhile, went into recess at 7 p.m. Friday, precluding the passage of any bill the Senate may have hashed out in the final minutes. The lower chamber also said it would give its members 24 hours’ notice of any vote.
While dozens of lawmakers put off their Christmas vacations in a last-ditch attempt to keep the government open, Trump spent the evening at the White House tweeting out sketches of his coveted wall — or, as he recently began calling it, “Steel Slats.”
“A design of our Steel Slat Barrier which is totally effective while at the same time beautiful!” Trump tweeted along with a computer-generated picture of grayish poles with spiked tips.
The President, who billed himself the ultimate deal maker during the 2016 campaign, dispatched Pence, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to Capitol Hill to meet privately with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“Schumer reminded them that any proposal with funding for the wall will not pass the Senate,” spokesman Angelo Roefaro said. He added that Schumer reminded Trump’s envoys that he’s willing to pass a stop-gap bill that will keep the government running at current spending levels through February.
Roefaro also said Schumer and Senate Dems are willing to take up either of the bills he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered Trump during an Oval Office meeting last week. The bills offer up between $1.3 billion and $1.6 billion in border security funding as long as it isn’t used for a wall.
The Senate already passed the stopgap measure Thursday, but Trump refused to sign it, sending lawmakers scrambling to draw up new plans.
With Senate Democrats and Republicans unable to come to an agreement,
funding ran out at midnight for the departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, State, Housing and Urban Development, Justice and Transportation. Dozens of agencies, including Environmental Protection and the national park and forest services, were also out of cash and set to shutter.
Some 420,000 employees within those agencies are still expected to report to work — but they won’t be collecting any paychecks in light of the shutdown. About another 380,000 federal employees will see their work schedules disrupted.
The shutdown came after Trump stubbornly refused for days to consider any deal that didn’t provide billions for a massive barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. Amid the tumult, Trump canceled his Friday afternoon trip to his private Florida estate for the holidays.
The wall that Trump once said Mexico would pay for will become a nonstarter once Democrats take control of the House in January. Trump supporters see this go-around as his last shot at fulfilling the controversial campaign promise.
Trump spent the days leading up to the congressional debacle blaming Democrats for an eventual shutdown in a flurry of factually dubious statements — including one tweet Friday morning that incorrectly stated President Ronald Reagan tried to build a border wall while in office.
The President’s finger-pointing proved a complete flip-flop to how he explicitly bragged last week that he’d be “proud” to shut down the government for the holiday weekend if Dems didn’t cave to his demands.
“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down,” Trump told Schumer and Pelosi during the combative Oval Office sit-down. “I’m not going to blame you for it.”
Democrats scoffed at Trump’s latest outburst and used his own words against him.
“You own the shutdown — your own words,” Schumer tweeted at Trump as Senate discussions were in full swing, linking to a video of the President’s boastful remarks. “The Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed a bipartisan solution to avoid a shutdown. Then you threw another temper tantrum and convinced the House to ignore that compromise.”
Trump is the first President since Bill Clinton to field more than one government shutdown while in office.
Trump’s first shutdown, in January of this year, lasted for two days after Democrats filibustered a Senate vote on a funding bill because Republicans refused to include extensions of legal status for immigrants who benefit from the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.