Is Government Shutting Down Again in March 2018
Government Shutdown Ends Later 3 Days of Recriminations
WASHINGTON — Congress brought an end to a three-twenty-four hour period authorities shutdown on Monday as Senate Democrats buckled under pressure level to prefer a short-term spending bill to fund authorities operations without commencement addressing the fate of immature undocumented immigrants.
The Firm quickly canonical the mensurate — which will fund the regime through February. 8 and extend funding for the popular Children's Health Insurance Plan for six years — and President Trump signed information technology on Mon nighttime.
The understanding also revealed fissures amidst Democrats, with about 1-third of the political party'due south members in the Senate and a bulk in the House voting against information technology.
The passage of the measure ended an ugly, if short-lived, impasse that threatened to give a black eye to both major political parties. The deal, reached after a bipartisan group of senators pushed their leaders to come to terms, enables hundreds of thousands of federal employees who had been facing furloughs to go back to work.
But a key part of the deal, a pledge by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the bulk leader, to allow an immigration vote in the coming weeks, sets the stage for a battle over the and then-called Dreamers, immature undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.s. illegally every bit children.
Lawmakers in the Firm and Senate are offering drastically unlike visions of how to resolve their fate. But those on both sides of the debate, likewise as advocates for immigrants' rights, said that ultimately Mr. Trump would need to get involved for the immigration dispute to be settled.
Mr. Trump's intentions were hard to discern, even as he took time to jab at the Democrats.
"Big win for Republicans as Democrats cave on Shutdown," the president said on Twitter at 11:xxx p.g.
The message connected: "Now I desire a big win for anybody, including Republicans, Democrats and DACA," referring to the Dreamers, "only peculiarly for our Great Armed forces and Border Security. Should exist able to get at that place. See you lot at the negotiating tabular array!"
The vote in the Senate was lopsided: 81 senators voted to end the shutdown while 18 — two Republicans and the remainder of the Democrats and an independent who caucuses with them — sided against the measure. In the Business firm, the vote was 266 to 150, with most three-quarters of Democrats opposed.
The measure also shored upwards the Children'southward Wellness Insurance Program, known as CHIP, which insures virtually nine million children. States had warned that they were on the verge of having to end coverage after Congress allowed funding for the plan, which had been created and sustained for two decades with bipartisan support, to elapse in September.
The votes came after a weekend of fevered negotiations past a bipartisan group that eventually grew to include about 25 senators, who helped put together a framework in which Democrats would vote to reopen the government in exchange for the promise from Mr. McConnell.
Paradigm
An apparent turning betoken came when Mr. McConnell took the Senate floor on Monday morning to announce that he would ensure a "level playing field" on immigration — language that some Democrats interpreted as going farther than he had before. Mr. McConnell said he would have the Senate take up clearing legislation by mid-February if the issue had not been resolved by then.
"I sabbatum on the floor and listened to him very intently, somewhat holding my jiff," said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. "I retrieve the majority leader has made a public commitment that information technology would be very difficult for him non to run into."
Simply Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, was unconvinced, and voted against the bill. She suggested that she did non trust Mr. McConnell.
"I refuse to put the lives of nearly 700,000 young people in the hands of someone who has repeatedly gone dorsum on his word," she said.
Immigrants' rights activists were crushed.
"Last week, I was moved to tears of joy when Democrats stood up and fought for progressive values and for Dreamers," said Frank Sharry, the executive managing director of America'southward Vox, an immigrants' rights group. "Today, I am moved to tears of disappointment and anger that Democrats blinked."
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants accept been protected from displacement nether an Obama-era initiative, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Mr. Trump rescinded the program in September and gave Congress six months, until March 5, to come up with a replacement.
Merely the president has demanded that border security — including coin for the "big, cute wall" he has promised at the southern border with United mexican states — be included in whatever package. Mr. Trump also wants limits on what critics call "chain migration," in which immigrants can sponsor their relatives, and an finish to the multifariousness visa lottery, which fosters immigration from countries that are underrepresented.
A bipartisan grouping of six senators, led by Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of Southward Carolina, has proposed the backbone of an immigration deal that backers hope could garner lx votes, enough to break a delay.
But Mr. Trump has rejected that plan. And the measure is almost certainly a nonstarter in the House, where Speaker Paul D. Ryan has promised a vote on a bourgeois clearing measure championed by the chairmen of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, if it has the support to pass.
"If nosotros are hoping that Paul Ryan is going to have courage and that the House Republicans are going to exist fair and decent and that a nib could sally, nosotros're smoking something," Mr. Sharry said.
Monday's Senate vote exposed a rift between moderate Democrats who are up for re-election this year in states won by Mr. Trump and their more liberal counterparts.
1 of those Trump-state Democrats, Senator Beak Nelson of Florida, characterized the vote as a "big win for the Dreamers," calculation that if the Senate passes a measure with more 60 votes, it would "put a lot of pressure level" on the House to act.
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But more than liberal Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who voted against the spending measure out, disagreed.
"The lesson to me is that a promise here is far less meaningful when there is no involvement by the Business firm, not to mention the White House," he said, adding that he has "no conviction, zero, that Paul Ryan will bring a measure to the flooring, in fact on the opposite."
Mr. Graham said it was disquisitional that the Senate'south eventual immigration bill have the support of a broad bipartisan majority of perhaps 70 senators.
"A partisan production doesn't become you to where you want to go," he said. "If you're going to make the play of trying to pick off a handful of the other side, it'due south going to crash and burn."
The shutdown crisis began Fri, after talks between Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Mr. Trump to keep the regime open broke down when the president and his master of staff demanded more concessions on immigration.
Co-ordinate to one person familiar with that twenty-four hours'southward word, Mr. Schumer agreed to more military spending and discussed fully funding the president'south request for a border wall in substitution for an understanding from the president to support legalizing the Dreamers.
Late that night, an overwhelming majority of Democrats, joined by a handful of Republicans, voted to block consideration of a spending bill very much like the measure that passed Monday. The only difference is that the initial neb would accept funded the regime for four weeks, non three.
A round of partisan finger-pointing ensued, with Democrats calling the impasse the "Trump Shutdown" and Republicans branding it the "Schumer Shutdown."
At the White House on Mon, Mr. Trump'southward press secretarial assistant, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted that Monday'southward deal was non "drastically dissimilar" than what was discussed on Friday between the president and Mr. Schumer.
Despite what was characterized by both parties as Mr. Trump's invisibility this weekend, Ms. Sanders insisted that he was responsible for making a deal happen.
"What the president did clearly worked," she said, adding, "The president stayed firm, Republicans stayed firm, and Democrats, I retrieve, realized that they had to motion by that slice of legislation" to discuss immigration going forward.
But Ms. Sanders declined to clarify precisely what the parameters of an immigration bargain would look similar. That worried Democrats like Senator Robert Menendez of New Bailiwick of jersey.
"The problem with all of this is the problem it's been from the beginning," Mr. Menendez said. "You got no guarantees from the Business firm. You got no guarantees from the president. So you accept two-thirds of the equation that are just not there."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/us/politics/congress-votes-to-end-government-shutdown.html
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