WASHINGTON >> The federal government shut down early today 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 the 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 at about 8:30 p.m. Eastern time Friday, when both the House and the Senate had adjourned with no solution in sight. Talks are expected to begin again today.
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.
Hawaii’s Democratic congressional delegation was blunt in its assessment of the shutdown.
In an emailed statement, U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono called the shutdown “totally unfair, completely unnecessary, and entirely the president’s fault.”
U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa said in an emailed statement, “It is unfortunate that in the midst of the holiday season President Trump is forcing more than 420,000 federal workers to continue on the job without pay.”
And U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz documented the whirlwind of events on Twitter, posting photos Thursday of a “17 minute visit” with his family when he landed in Honolulu, only to be called back to Washington.
U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard had not released a statement as of Friday night.
Work without pay
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 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 Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior — which includes national parks — Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury departments 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.
Potential compromises
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.
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 another solution.
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.
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 cowed by the tactic.
Star-Advertiser staff contributed to this report.
© 2018 The New York Times Company
