Government shutdown: first closure in four years looms hours before deadline
As the minutes ticked towards midnight, dueling parties in Congress showed no signs of breaking impasse over spending and Daca
Sabrina Siddiqui and Lauren Gambino in Washington Fri 19 Jan 2018
With less than 12 hours before a deadline of midnight to fund the government, the White House said the prospect of a shutdown had “ratcheted up” and blamed Democrats for objecting to the short-term spending measure that narrowly passed the House of Representatives on Thursday.
By Friday afternoon it was clear Democrats and a handful of Republicans were steadfast in their opposition. Donald Trump canceled plans to travel to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and summoned the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, to the White House.
But despite huddling behind closed doors for an hour and 15 minutes, the two New Yorkers fell short of reaching a deal.
“We made some progress, but we still have a good number of disagreements,” Schumer told reporters upon returning to Capitol Hill. “The discussion will continue.”
John Cornyn, the second-ranking Senate Republican, said he had spoken with White House chief of staff John Kelly, and heard that “the president told [Schumer] to go back to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and work it out”.
“The ball is in Senator Schumer’s court,” he added.
The meeting came hours after the White House laid blame squarely on the Democratic leader for bringing the federal government to the brink, even coining the term “Schumer shutdown”.
“We do not want a shutdown,” the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters. “If Mr Schumer insists on it, he is in a position to force this on the American people.”
But a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday found that 48% of Americans would blame Trump and the Republicans in the event of a government shutdown while 28% said the Democrats would be responsible and 18% said both parties would be equally at fault.
In a floor speech in the Senate, Mitch McConnell said a vote on the stopgap spending measure should be a “no brainer”. Democrats were willing to “hold the entire nation hostage” to protect “people who came into the United States illegally”, he said.
“To even repeat this position out loud is to see how completely ridiculous it is.”
Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, was more blunt.
“This is the greatest country in the world, but we do have some really stupid people representing it from time to time,” he said.
Trump was preparing to mark his first year in office on Saturday, potentially as the first president to oversee a shutdown with a single party in control of the government.
In an early morning tweet, he wrote: “Shutdown coming? We need more Republican victories in 2018!”
House Republican leaders, who found enough conservative votes to pass an extension of government funding through 16 February, said they would send their members home, escalating pressure on the Senate to pass something similar. In a subsequent advisory, House Republicans were told to “remain flexible” as further votes were possible.
Schumer has proposed a shorter stopgap measure, which would expire after four or five days, as a way of averting a shutdown without compromising Democrats’ attempts to negotiate an immigration deal.
Republicans balked at that timeline, noting that the shorter-term proposal would not resolve the issues over immigration or domestic spending.
Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, called the proposal “unproductive”. Mark Meadows, leader of the powerful conservative House Freedom Caucus, rejected it outright.
Senate Democrats cited a number of shortcomings in the House funding bill, ranging from immigration to emergency disaster relief. A handful of conservatives in the Senate also objected, leaving Republicans short of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.
A shutdown would place nearly 40% of federal employees on unpaid furlough and cost the US an estimated $6.5bn a week.
The primary sticking point for Democrats remained a failure to offer protections for the nearly 700,000 undocumented migrants, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the US as children. In September, Trump rescinded an Obama-era program that granted temporary legal status, exposing the young migrants to deportation.
The already-fraught negotiations were severely damaged last week when Trump reportedly questioned the need to admit immigrants from “shithole countries”, in reference to Haiti, El Salvador and Africa.
Trump then undermined efforts by Republicans to garner support for their bill, denouncing the measure for including a six-year reauthorization of a popular children’s health insurance program.
The White House strongly rejected the notion that the president had been disengaged and bore some of the blame for the breakdown in bipartisan talks.
“There is no way you could lay this at the feet of the president of the United States,” Mulvaney said. “He is actively working to get a deal.”
Amid the chaos on Friday morning, the Democratic congressman Al Green once again forced the House to vote on Trump’s impeachment. Though the resolution was again postponed on a strong bipartisan vote, it drew more support from Democrats than previously.
Additional reporting by Ben Jacobs
