New York Times
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Thomas Kaplan
January 23, 2018
Congress brought an end to a three-day government shutdown on Monday as Senate Democrats buckled under pressure to adopt a short-term spending bill to fund government operations without first addressing the fate of young unauthorized immigrants.
The House quickly approved the measure — which will fund the government through Feb. 8 and extend funding for the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years — and President Trump signed it on Monday night.
The agreement also revealed fissures among Democrats, with about one-third of the party’s members in the Senate and a majority in the House voting against it.
Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley were among the Democrats voting no.
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 Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, to allow an immigration vote in the coming weeks, sets the stage for a battle over the so-called Dreamers, young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are offering drastically different visions of how to resolve their fate. But those on both sides of the debate, as well as advocates for immigrants’ rights, said that ultimately Trump would need to get involved for the immigration dispute to be settled.
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.
The message continued: “Now I want a big win for everyone, including Republicans, Democrats and DACA,” referring to the “Dreamers,” “but especially for our Great Military and Border Security. Should be able to get there. See you 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 Democrats and an independent who caucuses with them — sided against the measure. In the House, the vote was 266-150, with about three-quarters of Democrats opposed.
The measure also shored up the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, which insures nearly 9 million children. States had warned that they were on the verge of having to end coverage after Congress allowed funding for the program — which had been created and sustained for two decades with bipartisan support — to expire in September.
The fate of childhood immigrants
The votes came after a weekend of fevered negotiations by 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 McConnell.
An apparent turning point came when 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 further than he had before. McConnell said he would have the Senate take up immigration legislation by mid-February if the issue had not been resolved by then.
“I sat on the floor and listened to him very intently, somewhat holding my breath,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. “I think the majority leader has made a public commitment that it would be very hard for him not to meet.”
But Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was unconvinced, and voted against the bill. She suggested that she did not trust McConnell.
“I refuse to put the lives of nearly 700,000 young people in the hands of someone who has repeatedly gone back 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 director of America’s Voice, an immigrants’ rights group. “Today, I am moved to tears of disappointment and anger that Democrats blinked.”
Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants have been protected from deportation under an Obama era initiative, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Trump rescinded the program in September and gave Congress six months, until March 5, to come up with a replacement.
But the president has demanded that border security — including money for the “big, beautiful wall” he has promised at the southern border with Mexico — be included in any package. Trump also wants limits on what critics call “chain migration,” in which immigrants can sponsor their relatives, and an end to the diversity visa lottery, which fosters immigration from countries that are underrepresented.
A bipartisan group of six senators, led by Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has proposed the backbone of an immigration deal that might garner 60 votes, enough to break a filibuster.
But Trump has rejected that plan. And the measure is almost certainly a nonstarter in the House, where Speaker Paul Ryan has promised a vote on a conservative immigration measure championed by the chairmen of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, if it has the support to pass.
“If we are hoping that Paul Ryan is going to have courage and that the House Republicans are going to be fair and decent and that a bill could emerge, we’re smoking something,” Sharry said.
Democrats divided
Monday’s Senate vote exposed a rift between moderate Democrats who are up for re-election this year in states won by Trump and their more liberal counterparts.
One of those Trump-state Democrats, Sen. 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, it would “put a lot of pressure” on the House to act.
But more liberal Democrats, including Sen. 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 House,” he said, adding that he has “no confidence, zero, that Paul Ryan will bring a measure to the floor, in fact on the contrary.”
Graham said it was critical that the Senate’s eventual immigration bill have the support of a broad bipartisan majority of perhaps 70 senators.
“A partisan product doesn’t get 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’s going to crash and burn.”
The shutdown crisis began Friday, after talks between Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Trump to keep the government open broke down when the president and his chief of staff demanded more concessions on immigration.
According to one person familiar with that day’s discussion, Schumer agreed to more military spending and discussed fully funding the president’s request for a border wall in exchange for an agreement from the president to support legalizing the DACA participants.
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 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 it the “Schumer Shutdown.”
At the White House on Monday, Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted that Monday’s deal was not “drastically different” than what was discussed on Friday between the president and Schumer.
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