On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. government shut down.
A gridlocked Congress spent Friday at an impasse, with half-hearted efforts to come to a bipartisan agreement on a stopgap funding measure to prevent a government shutdown at midnight falling short in the end.
“Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots,” Louisiana Republican John Kennedy summarized Friday afternoon.
A House-passed continuing resolution to keep the government open failed on the Senate floor when it came to a vote just two hours before the midnight deadline. The CR would have extended government spending through February 16 and would have fully funded the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years.
It required 60 votes to clear the cloture hurdle in the Senate, but Republican leaders managed to scrounge together only 50 votes for the bill. Five Democrats joined with Republicans to back it.
After it was clear the CR would fail, leaders opted to hold the vote open for longer than two hours, as lawmakers frantically negotiated and worked through strategy among their colleagues as the clock ticked past midnight. The ordeal ended with barbed speeches from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
“The government shutdown was 100 percent avoidable,” McConnell said on the Senate floor afterward. “Now it is imminent.”
Five Republicans joined 44 Democrats in opposing the CR: Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted against the bill as a procedural tool in order to be able to bring it back up for a vote at a later time.
Most Senate Democrats voted down the measure because it did not include protections for nearly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who arrived to the United States as children and who had been protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Democrats have supported several stopgap funding bills since September without demanding a DACA replacement, but pressure has mounted from immigration activists who want to see protections for DACA recipients codified before the program expires on March 5.
In a last-ditch effort, McConnell offered an alternative to the House CR, which would fund the government for three weeks instead of four. A vote on the amended CR has not yet been taken, but House lawmakers are at the ready to consider the bill if necessary.
In the meantime, representatives are playing the blame game.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump to discuss the spending stalemate Friday afternoon, pinned responsibility for the shutdown on the president in a floor speech after the failed CR vote.
“It’s almost as if you were rooting for a shutdown,” said Schumer, “and now we’ll have one.”
Schumer’s remarks elicited an audible laugh from Texas Republican Ted Cruz, seated across the chamber.
Republicans have branded the spending lapse the “Schumer Shutdown,” arguing Democrats are responsible because they withheld their support for a short-term funding bill in the Senate, where McConnell needed help from Democrats to reach 60 votes and get the measure to Trump’s desk.
“All of this is just unnecessary. It is reckless. Senate Democrats have brought us to a shutdown,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement early Saturday morning.
But some Senate Republicans privately acknowledged Trump’s mixed messages on immigration, a lack of clarity from the White House, and a tweet in which the president seemingly came out against the GOP’s plan to include the CHIP extension in the short-term spending bill also hurt congressional Republicans’ efforts to pass a CR.
“Like one of his buildings, this shutdown will have Trump written all over it,” one senior Senate GOP aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD early Saturday morning.
Both houses of Congress will convene Saturday to attempt to slog through the government funding mess.
