Erin Schaff / The New York Times
Caution tape outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Dec. 21, 2018. Hours away from a Friday midnight deadline, when funding was set to run out for a number of federal departments, President Donald Trump unleashed a flurry of morning tweets as he reveled in a House vote Thursday that passed stopgap spending legislation that would extend funding until early February, with an additional $5.7 billion to begin construction of a wall on the border with Mexico.
Friday, Dec. 21, 2018 | 10:45 p.m.
WASHINGTON — The federal government shut down early Saturday after congressional and White House officials failed to find a compromise on a spending bill that hinged on President Donald Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion for a border wall.
It is third shutdown in two years of unified Republican rule in Washington, and it will stop work at nine federal departments and several other agencies. Hundreds of thousands of government employees are affected.
Any hope of a compromise ended about 8:30 p.m. Friday, when both the House and the Senate had adjourned with no solution in sight. Talks are expected to begin again Saturday.
A burst of late-afternoon activity could not break the deadlock even as Vice President Mike Pence met with Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, and senior House Republicans, searching for a solution to a logjam that Trump has shown little interest in breaking.
Late Friday, as his budget director ordered the carrying out of government shutdown plans, Trump told the country in a video on Twitter that “we’re going to have a shutdown.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that because we need the Democrats to give us their votes,” he said in the video.
As in previous government shutdowns, it would not affect core government functions like the Postal Service, the military, the Department of Veterans Affairs and entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps.
But about 380,000 workers would be sent home and would not be paid. Another 420,000 considered too essential to be furloughed would be forced, like the Border Patrol officers, to work without pay.
The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior — which includes national parks — Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury would all be affected. NASA would also be hit.
There had been a glimmer of progress late in the day when the Senate voted, 48-47, with Pence breaking a tie, to begin debating stopgap spending legislation passed Thursday night by the House that would keep the government running through Feb. 8 and provide $5.7 billion to begin construction of the border wall.
But the vote was more a repudiation of Trump’s proposal than an endorsement of it. Senators in both parties conceded that the measure could not pass the chamber, where major legislation requires bipartisan support, and said they were advancing it only to allow negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders in both parties to proceed on a compromise that all sides could accept.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, said the Senate had approved the measure “in order to preserve maximum flexibility for productive conversations to continue between the White House and our Democratic colleagues.”
Schumer said the vote only underscored what Democrats had been telling Trump since last week, when the president declared during a combative Oval Office meeting that he would be proud to shut down the government and shoulder the blame if he could not win support to fund his border wall.
“His wall does not have 60 votes here in the Senate, let alone 50 votes — that much is now clear,” Schumer said. “We are willing to continue discussions” on proposals to keep the government funded, he added.
While Trump has been unwilling to consider dropping his demand to fund his signature campaign promise, Pence and other White House officials were discussing a number of potential compromises that would force him to do just that, omitting spending on a wall and instead adding money for other security measures at the border, according to several officials with knowledge of the talks.
And in his video, Trump appeared to be moderating his position slightly, calling for “great border security with a wall, or a slat fence, or whatever you want to call it — but we need a great barrier.”
“Let’s be bipartisan and let’s get it done,” Trump said. “The shutdown hopefully will not last long.”
It was an appropriate end to a period of unified Republican rule of the White House and both chambers of Congress that has been marked by dysfunction and infighting, a mercurial president whose shifting positions and whims have scuttled legislative deals, and Republican leaders and lawmakers who cower at the prospect of angering his core supporters.
Negotiations continued among White House and congressional officials Friday night after Pence left a quiet Capitol, with the talks expected to continue Saturday but there was no clear sense of where they might lead. The House and Senate remained on standby, planning to reconvene but devoid, for the moment, of any measure that would reopen the government and bridge the divide.
The vote unfolded as Pence, along with Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director and incoming chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, huddled in the Capitol to jump-start negotiations. The prospect of a deal has been hampered by the president’s refusal to budge on the wall, or to indicate what alternatives he would be willing to accept to keep the government open.
Among the options discussed behind closed doors were proposals that would allocate $1.6 billion to a total of $2.5 billion to border security, none of which could be spent on a wall. But it was not clear that conservatives in the House, who insisted Thursday on adding $5.7 billion for the physical barrier the president has demanded to the stopgap spending measure, would back that solution.
“What I want is real money for the wall,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, who declined to say how much funding he would consider sufficient, but said $1.6 billion was not enough.
In a meeting in his office just off the Senate floor, Schumer flatly told Pence, Mulvaney and Kushner, who had requested to meet with him, that any measure that included money for the wall could not pass the Senate, and urged them to consider agreeing to one that omitted it but included funding for other forms of border security, according to a spokesman.
Complicating the chances of such a deal was the president’s own refusal to detail his bottom line in negotiations. During a meeting with Republican senators Friday morning, Trump would not provide specifics about what kind of plan he could support, including how much money he would accept for fortifying the border, despite their repeated efforts to ascertain his conditions for a deal, according to a Senate official briefed on the session who insisted on anonymity to describe it. The president talked at length about the wall and repeatedly pressed the senators about eliminating the filibuster so they could fund it with 51 votes.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, appeared practically giddy at the prospect that Trump’s aides were engaging in serious talks with lawmakers, saying, “The fact that that’s happening represents real progress,” and adding that he was “so happy about it.”
Without a strategy for averting a shutdown, Trump spent the day maneuvering to ensure that Democrats would shoulder the blame, notwithstanding his public courting of the dysfunctional denouement.
He began the day warning on Twitter that a partial government shutdown “will last for a very long time.”
“If enough Dems don’t vote, it will be a Democrat Shutdown!” Trump wrote. “House Republicans were great yesterday!”
He was referring to a nearly party line vote in the House on Thursday night to add the wall funding to the stopgap spending bill despite almost certain defeat of the measure once it reached the Senate. House Republicans also added roughly $8 billion in disaster aid for farmers, a critical sweetener that helped advance a bill that they feared until the last moment might not have enough votes to pass.
Yet the only certainty to emerge was an intense round of political blame-shifting.
House passage of the wall funding did change the dynamics of the fight, putting Senate Democrats in the position of being the spoilers of a measure to keep the government running. Democrats, who believe their leverage will only grow when they assume the majority in the House in January, did not appear to be cowed by the tactic.
“Abandon your shutdown strategy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, addressing his remarks to the president. “You’re not getting the wall today, next week, or on Jan. 3 when Democrats take control of the House.”
The president also urged McConnell to pursue what is known as the nuclear option and abolish a rule that allows any senator to block final votes on legislation, often used by the minority party to thwart major bills. The tactic was used by Senate Democrats to lower the threshold to 51 votes and end a Republican blockade of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees. Senate Republicans then used the same move to end filibusters of Supreme Court nominees.
“Mitch, use the Nuclear Option and get it done!” Trump tweeted. “Our Country is counting on you!”
McConnell has long said that there was no support for dismantling the 60-vote requirement on legislation, and he and a number of senior Republican senators released statements Friday morning in advance of the meeting with Trump making it clear it would not happen.
“The leader has said for years that the votes are not there in the conference to use the nuclear option,” David Popp, his spokesman, said in a statement. “Just this morning, several senators put out statements confirming their opposition, and confirming that there is not a majority in the conference to go down that road.”
Even as Trump mocked Democratic opposition and objections to his vision of a wall at the border with Mexico (“It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better,” Trump wrote), he seemed to acknowledge that the wall funding proposal was not getting through the Senate.
“No matter what happens today in the Senate, Republican House Members should be very proud of themselves,” Trump wrote. “They flew back to Washington from all parts of the World in order to vote for Border Security and the Wall.”
“We will get it done, one way or the other!” the president wrote in another tweet.
With funding set to expire, the nine federal departments and several other agencies were beginning preparations. Some agencies will have enough money in the pipeline to carry them into the new year, but thousands of government workers are expected to be furloughed or required to work through the holidays without pay.
“It’s actually part of what you do when you sign up for any public service position,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters Thursday. “It’s not lost on me in terms of the potential hardship.”
Several House lawmakers blamed Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California and Schumer for the impending shutdown, arguing that they were unwilling to compromise on border security. But with Democrats set to reclaim the House majority in two weeks, there is little motivation for Pelosi to acquiesce to the president’s demands.
In the aftermath of Trump’s insistence that he would own a government shutdown, House Democratic aides had already begun crafting legislation that would reopen the government come Jan. 3 and the swearing-in of new members.
