US government goes into shutdown after Senate rejects funding bill / With government shutdown, Republicans reap what they sow / VIDEO:Mitch McConnell: Democrats got "their very own government shutdown"

Speaking on the floor after the vote, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blamed the government shutdown on a “cynical decision by the Democrats”. However, his counterpart, minority leader Chuck Schumer, blamed Donald Trump, saying the president had “walked away from two bipartisan deals” and that “a Trump shutdown will serve as a perfect encapsulation for the chaos he has unleashed”.

US government goes into shutdown after Senate rejects funding bill

White House calls Democrats ‘obstructionist losers’ as federal agencies head into the first closure for five years

Sabrina Siddiqui, Ben Jacobs and Lauren Gambino in Washington

Sat 20 Jan 2018 08.00 GMT First published on Sat 20 Jan 2018 03.33 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/20/us-government-faces-shutdown-after-senate-rejects-funding-bill

The United States has its first government shutdown in nearly five years after senators failed to reach a deal to keep the lights on.

An effort by Republicans to keep the government open for one month was rejected in a vote on Friday night after they failed to address Democratic concerns about young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

Republicans needed 60 votes to make the bill filibuster-proof, but the legislation only received the support of 50 senators. Five red state Democrats broke ranks to support the bill while four Republicans voted against.

A filibuster allows a senator, or a series of senators, to speak for as long as they wish, and on any topic they choose, unless “three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn” (60 out of 100 senators) vote for the bill.

But 12.00am ET came and went without a deal, causing funding for the federal government to lapse. Federal law requires agencies to shut down if Congress has not appropriated money to fund them. Hundreds of thousands of “non-essential” federal employees will be put on temporary unpaid leave. In previous shutdowns, services deemed “essential”, such as the work of the homeland security and the FBI, have continued.

Speaking on the floor after the vote, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell assailed the shutdown as the result of a “cynical decision by the Democrats”. His opposite number, minority leader Chuck Schumer, delivered a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump, blaming the president for the shutdown. The New York Democrat said Trump “walked away from two bipartisan deals” and that “a Trump shutdown will serve as a perfect encapsulation for the chaos he has unleashed”.

A White House statement issued just before midnight said “this is the behavior of obstructionist losers, not legislators”.

Democrats earlier blamed Republican divisions for the failure of the vote. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said lawmakers from his rival party were not on the same page as president Donald Trump.

“You’ve got the three branches of government – everything,” Wyden said. “Can these folks organize a two-car parade?”

On Thursday, the House had voted by a margin of 230-197 to advance the bill after speaker Paul Ryan made concessions to conservative Republicans in the Freedom Caucus. These included a vote on increased military funding, a potential vote on a hardline immigration bill and other “subplots”, which Mark Meadows, the head of the Freedom Caucus, declined to share with reporters. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with only six Democrats and 11 Republicans breaking ranks.

The bill did not contain any provisions to protect Dreamers, which has been a key Democratic priority since Donald Trump announced in September that he was rescinding an Obama-era program, known as Daca. The program enabled young, undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to obtain temporary legal status.

After the bill passed the House, Ryan preemptively tried to blame Democrats for any government shutdown, telling reporters: “The only people standing in the way of keeping the government open are Senate Democrats.”

 The Ohio Clock strikes midnight in the Senate, marking the beginning of the federal shutdown. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

In a final dash to avert a shutdown, Trump cancelled plans to depart for his Mar-a-lago resort in Florida, where the president was due to celebrate the anniversary of his first year in office. Instead, Trump spent the day negotiating with congressional leaders.

But despite hosting Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, the sides were unable to reach an agreement.

Trump and Schumer, who both hail from New York, negotiated over cheeseburgers in a small dining room adjacent to the Oval Office.

A source briefed on the meeting said Schumer offered not only to meet Trump’s full funding request for a border wall, but also agreed to boosting defense spending “far above” what the White House had requested.

In exchange, Schumer requested a short-term measure that would keep the government open for just a few days, in the hopes of keeping pressure on lawmakers to reach a broader compromise. The president even seemed amenable to Schumer’s approach, the source said, and told the Democratic leader he would broach the topic with Republican leaders.

But not long after Schumer returned to the Capitol, he received a phone call from John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Kelly, who emerged as an unexpected hardliner on immigration, informed Schumer the contours of the deal he discussed with Trump were too liberal.

As lawmakers scrambled to chart a path forward, progressive activists and Dreamers held a rally against the illuminated backdrop of the US Capitol. They implored lawmakers to reject any funding measure that did not include a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 700,000 Dreamers whose protections will expire in March barring intervention from Congress.

“For all those Dreamers out there, our message for each and every one of you: there are those in our government that see you, that hear you, that believe and know that this country belongs to you,” said Congressman Joe Kennedy III, a Democrat of Massachusetts, who repeated the message in Spanish.

Funding for the government was initially due to expire in September, but lawmakers have since passed a series of stopgap measures to keep operations running in the absence of a long-term spending deal.

The last short-term extension, which was passed in December, pushed the deadline to 19 January while leaving the fate of Dreamers in limbo. Democrats subsequently faced backlash from immigration advocates and their base for failing to hold the line on Daca after having vowed not to adjourn for the new year without a solution.

Trump gave Congress until 5 March to replace the program. But Democrats have insisted the only way to resolve the deep partisan divide over immigration is by tying it to a must-pass bill that would simultaneously avert a shutdown and enshrine protections for Dreamers into law.

Trump showed a brief willingness to compromise last week by engaging lawmakers from both parties on a potential deal to legalize Dreamers in return for beefing up border security and changes to certain visa programs. But the president dramatically undermined bipartisan talks by questioning the need to admit immigrants from places such as Haiti and El Salvador, dismissing them “shithole countries” in a private meeting with lawmakers.

Republicans meanwhile chose to move ahead with a short-term bill to fund the government, arguing that immigration was a separate issue to be dealt with at a later time. In a bid to apply pressure on Democrats, they also included in their measure a six-year authorization of the popular child health insurance program (Chip), which provides healthcare coverage to 9 million children.

With government shutdown, Republicans reap what they sow

Richard Wolffe

It takes a special type of hypocrite to accuse your opponents of hypocrisy for following in your footsteps

 @richardwolffedc

Sat 20 Jan 2018 04.45 GMT Last modified on Sat 20 Jan 2018 06.28 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/20/with-government-shutdown-republicans-reap-what-they-sow

For Christian conservatives, Donald Trump may be a sinner but he’s really doing God’s work.

Today’s Republican party is built on principle. As a matter of principle, the GOP believes it is the only party that can shut down government as a negotiating tactic. The Democrats’ job is to keep that government open and to cave in to its demands.

These truths we hold to be self-evident, after watching several rounds of this sad kabuki theater through the Clinton and Obama years.

Now that the Democrats have triggered a government shutdown, Republicans are outraged. Because of their principles, you know.

The ideologue responsible for Trump’s budget, Mick Mulvaney, put it best to reporters at the White House on Friday. Mulvaney, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, was previously a South Carolina congressman. In that role, he was one of the chief proponents of the last government shutdown because he opposed Planned Parenthood and Obamacare.

Now he says the Democrats have no right to do what he did because, well, that would make them unprincipled.

“Keep in mind, go back and watch what they said about folks during the 2013 shutdown who wanted to talk about things like the Obamacare repeal at that time,” he said. “One of the criticisms they made of folks like me is that I was inserting non-financial issues into an appropriations process, which is exactly what’s happening now. So I recognize the fact that Washington does not understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy and irony. The truth of the matter is they’re doing the exact same thing they accused the Republicans of doing in 2013.”

Ah yes, the irony of it all. It takes a special type of hypocrite to accuse your opponents of hypocrisy for following in your footsteps.

As a matter of principle, it’s Republicans like Mulvaney who are the deficit hawks, caring deeply about the fiscal rectitude of the federal government. Right up to the point when one of them says the words “tax cuts”, which turn out to be far more important than balancing the budget or the national debt.

Thank goodness we have the Republicans in total control of Washington, after all those years of the Democrats failing to pass a real budget. Now we can watch the Republicans create an even more dysfunctional budget process with continuing resolutions that last just a few weeks at a time.

This is not the only principled issue that defines today’s GOP.

As a matter of principle, Republicans are the party closest to God, rallying the faithful at the March for Life rally by anti-abortion activists, who also love to rail against Planned Parenthood. Thank God for the leadership of a conservative president whose lawyer paid tens of thousands of dollars to a porn star, through a shell company and false names.

Before she signed a non-disclosure agreement, the porn star disclosed the sordid details of her affair with the current president soon after his third wife gave birth to his third son.

For Christian conservatives, Donald Trump may be a sinner but he’s really doing God’s work. That’s a whole new definition of family values right there.

This is the kind of irony that Republicans ought to understand. After all, the first real shutdowns of the current era – the shutdown that set the tone for all that followed – was the product of Newt Gingrich’s war against Bill Clinton. The 1995 and 1996 debacles were ideological clashes over the size of government by a flame-throwing House Speaker who wanted to cut the president down to size.

That was the first salvo in a war over family values that led to Clinton’s impeachment for an affair with an unpaid intern that began during that same shutdown. Of course Gingrich himself had been unfaithful with another woman for a couple of years before that shutdown. Callista Bisek became his third wife, and is now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican. So there’s no irony or hypocrisy there at all.

At least the 1990s shutdowns were about the budget. The next government shutdown in 2013 was simply about defunding Obamacare and destroying Barack Obama. For some Tea Party-infused Republicans, this was a principled stand. For every Republican senator other than Ted Cruz, it was madness.

Now Republicans are perfectly entitled to say Democrats are copying them. We can argue about whether their principles about Obamacare are more or less important than the Democratic efforts to stop the deportation of children brought to the country as undocumented immigrants.

We can surely all agree that shutdowns are an insane way to manage political disputes at any time, by any party. Democrats should take no pride in shutting down the government.

But Republicans cannot, as a matter of principle, pretend to be outraged that Democrats are following them. And they cannot, as a matter of political good sense, pretend like the electoral damage is all going to fall on their opponents.

Like some political goldfish swimming in a bowl of amnesia, Republicans have forgotten they picked up seats in the mid-term elections following their own 2013 shutdown. In fact they picked up control of the Senate, and with it, blocked everything Obama wanted to do, including his nomination of a supreme court justice.

The GOP believes it has set a brilliant trap for Democrats with a cunning ploy of pretending to care about children’s health insurance. “Who could vote against children?” says the party that allowed the insurance to lapse in October.

And who could support the deportation of children? The one thing Republicans didn’t count on was their own president, whose racist rant about “shithole” countries blew up a hard-fought bipartisan deal on immigration.

This is a shithole of the Republicans’ own making. They control all sides of Washington and have now made history by presiding over their own shutdown, under a president who prided himself on knowing the art of the deal.

No deal, no sympathy: polls suggest most voters blame both Trump and the Republicans for the open sewer that stretches all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue.

During previous shutdowns, calm heads ultimately prevailed: people who cared about good government, or at least worried about the polls that pointed to widespread public disgust. But this is now Donald Trump’s Washington and there are no calm heads to be found.

As a matter of principle, Republicans cannot come together to agree a deal on immigration. As a matter of sanity, Donald Trump cannot stop his racist belching or surrender the fantasy about his Mexican wall. This shutdown shit-show could run and run.