Can Democrats Shutdown Government Again Feb 2018
Authorities Shutdown Ends Subsequently 3 Days of Recriminations
WASHINGTON — Congress brought an end to a three-day government shutdown on Monday as Senate Democrats buckled nether pressure level to adopt a curt-term spending bill to fund government operations without first addressing the fate of immature undocumented immigrants.
The House quickly canonical the measure — which volition fund the government through Feb. viii and extend funding for the popular Children'due south Wellness Insurance Programme for half-dozen years — and President Trump signed it on Monday nighttime.
The agreement too revealed fissures among Democrats, with almost i-third of the political party's members in the Senate and a bulk in the Firm voting confronting information technology.
The passage of the measure out ended an ugly, if short-lived, impasse that threatened to give a blackness middle to both major political parties. The deal, reached later a bipartisan grouping of senators pushed their leaders to come to terms, enables hundreds of thousands of federal employees who had been facing furloughs to become back to work.
But a key part of the bargain, a pledge by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the bulk leader, to allow an immigration vote in the coming weeks, sets the phase for a boxing over the so-called Dreamers, immature undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Lawmakers in the Business firm and Senate are offering drastically different visions of how to resolve their fate. Simply those on both sides of the debate, also every bit advocates for immigrants' rights, said that ultimately Mr. Trump would need to get involved for the immigration dispute to be settled.
Mr. Trump'south intentions were hard to discern, even as he took fourth dimension to jab at the Democrats.
"Big win for Republicans as Democrats cave on Shutdown," the president said on Twitter at eleven:30 p.yard.
The message continued: "Now I desire a big win for everyone, including Republicans, Democrats and DACA," referring to the Dreamers, "but specially for our Great Military and Border Security. Should be able to get at that place. See yous at the negotiating table!"
The vote in the Senate was lopsided: 81 senators voted to end the shutdown while 18 — two Republicans and the rest of the Democrats and an independent who caucuses with them — sided against the measure. In the House, the vote was 266 to 150, with about three-quarters of Democrats opposed.
The measure also shored up the Children's Health Insurance Programme, known as CHIP, which insures nearly nine million children. States had warned that they were on the verge of having to terminate coverage later on Congress allowed funding for the program, which had been created and sustained for 2 decades with bipartisan support, to expire in September.
The votes came after a weekend of fevered negotiations past a bipartisan group that eventually grew to include almost 25 senators, who helped put together a framework in which Democrats would vote to reopen the regime in exchange for the hope from Mr. McConnell.
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An apparent turning betoken came when Mr. McConnell took the Senate floor on Mon morn 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 accept the Senate take upwardly immigration legislation past mid-Feb if the issue had non been resolved by then.
"I sat on the flooring and listened to him very attentively, somewhat holding my breath," said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. "I think the majority leader has fabricated a public commitment that it would be very difficult for him not to meet."
Simply Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, was unconvinced, and voted against the bill. She suggested that she did not trust Mr. McConnell.
"I refuse to put the lives of nearly 700,000 young people in the easily of someone who has repeatedly gone back on his word," she said.
Immigrants' rights activists were crushed.
"Last calendar week, I was moved to tears of joy when Democrats stood upward and fought for progressive values and for Dreamers," said Frank Sharry, the executive manager of America's Voice, an immigrants' rights grouping. "Today, I am moved to tears of disappointment and anger that Democrats blinked."
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants have been protected from displacement under an Obama-era initiative, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Mr. Trump rescinded the plan in September and gave Congress six months, until March v, to come up up with a replacement.
Simply the president has demanded that border security — including money for the "big, cute wall" he has promised at the southern border with United mexican states — be included in any package. Mr. Trump also wants limits on what critics call "chain migration," in which immigrants tin sponsor their relatives, and an cease 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 South Carolina, has proposed the backbone of an immigration deal that backers promise could garner lx votes, enough to suspension a filibuster.
Just 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 conservative 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 bill could emerge, we're smoking something," Mr. Sharry said.
Monday'south Senate vote exposed a rift between moderate Democrats who are upwardly for re-ballot this twelvemonth in states won by Mr. Trump and their more than liberal counterparts.
One of those Trump-state Democrats, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, characterized the vote as a "big win for the Dreamers," adding that if the Senate passes a measure with more than 60 votes, information technology would "put a lot of force per unit area" on the House to act.
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Only more than liberal Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who voted against the spending measure, disagreed.
"The lesson to me is that a promise here is far less meaningful when there is no involvement by the House, not to mention the White Business firm," he said, adding that he has "no confidence, null, that Paul Ryan will bring a measure out to the floor, in fact on the opposite."
Mr. Graham said it was disquisitional that the Senate's eventual immigration bill have the back up of a wide bipartisan majority of maybe seventy senators.
"A partisan product doesn't go you to where you want to go," he said. "If you lot're going to brand the play of trying to pick off a handful of the other side, it's going to crash and burn."
The shutdown crunch began Friday, after talks between Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Mr. Trump to keep the regime open up broke down when the president and his principal of staff demanded more than concessions on clearing.
Co-ordinate to one person familiar with that day's discussion, Mr. Schumer agreed to more military spending and discussed fully funding the president's request for a border wall in commutation for an agreement from the president to support legalizing the Dreamers.
Late that night, an overwhelming majority of Democrats, joined past a scattering of Republicans, voted to block consideration of a spending pecker very much like the mensurate that passed Monday. The only difference is that the initial bill would have funded the government for four weeks, not three.
A round of partisan finger-pointing ensued, with Democrats calling the impasse the "Trump Shutdown" and Republicans branding information technology the "Schumer Shutdown."
At the White Firm on Monday, Mr. Trump's press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted that Monday's deal was not "drastically unlike" than what was discussed on Friday betwixt 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 bargain happen.
"What the president did clearly worked," she said, adding, "The president stayed business firm, Republicans stayed house, and Democrats, I think, realized that they had to move past that piece of legislation" to discuss immigration going frontwards.
But Ms. Sanders declined to clarify precisely what the parameters of an immigration deal would wait like. That worried Democrats like Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
"The trouble with all of this is the problem it's been from the kickoff," Mr. Menendez said. "You got no guarantees from the Business firm. You got no guarantees from the president. Then yous have two-thirds of the equation that are just not in that location."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/us/politics/congress-votes-to-end-government-shutdown.html
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