Congressional Republicans last followed through on such a threat in October 2013, forcing a partial shutdown that lasted 16 days. Some 800,000 federal employees were furloughed. A million more employees suffered delays in receiving their paychecks. Credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s said the shutdown sucked $24 billion out of the economy.
Then and now: Trump on government shutdowns
McConnell to Dems: What did you accomplish?
Sen. Schumer’s message to the President
Graham: We can’t let this continue to fester
A view of Capitol Hill January 17, 2018 in Washington, DC. / AFP PHOTO / Brendan Smialowski (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
How past government shutdowns played out
Bernie Sanders 1-19-17 AC
Sanders: McConnell does not have 60 votes
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Schumer: We can do this with or without Trump
The US Capitol is seen in Washington, DC, on January 3, 2018 before the opening of the second session of the 115th Congress.
The US Congress hits the ground running as its 2018 session kicks off, with President Donald Trump facing a two-week deadline to forge a compromise between Republicans and Democrats on immigration reform and the budget. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
CNN poll: GOP would take blame for shutdown
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Lawmaker: Not enough votes to avert shutdown
sen markey erin burnett split
Burnett to Dem senator: Is this not hypocrisy?
Pelosi slams Republicans for ‘dilly-dallying’
GOP rep.: Dems’ fault if government shuts down
MCCONNELL:WANT IMMIGRATION BILL TRUMP SUPPORTS –
McConnell: Unclear what Trump wants in deal
The U.S. Capitol is pictured on July 27, 2017 in Washington, DC.
What a government shutdown means for you
Government shuts down after Senate vote fails
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 11: U.S. President Donald Trump leads a prison reform roundtable in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, on January 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. State and local leaders joined Trump to discuss programs intended to help prisoners re-enter the workforce among other policy initiatives. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Then and now: Trump on government shutdowns
McConnell to Dems: What did you accomplish?
Sen. Schumer’s message to the President
Graham: We can’t let this continue to fester
A view of Capitol Hill January 17, 2018 in Washington, DC. / AFP PHOTO / Brendan Smialowski (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
How past government shutdowns played out
Bernie Sanders 1-19-17 AC
Sanders: McConnell does not have 60 votes
Washington (CNN)If Congress can’t agree on a plan to fund the federal government before time runs out, a shutdown is expected to affect millions of Americans.
For starters, the continuing resolution proposed by House Republicans would include a six-year reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program — but if it doesn’t pass the Senate, CHIP will be funded only through March.
And thousands of federal employees will be placed on furlough — meaning they won’t report to work Monday.
Since the last shutdown, the District of Columbia has made changes to its protocol to help protect Washington services from being affected by a federal shutdown. Mayor Muriel Bowser vowed that city services will continue, unlike last time when some city employees, such as garbage collectors, were furloughed.
“People from across the nation and around the world come to visit Washington, DC, our nation’s capital,” said Department of Public Works Director Chris Shorter in a statement. ” We take great pride in our city and want to ensure that it’s clean and looks its best, regardless of what’s happening at the federal level.”
Who’s affected by the government shutdown?
700,000 undocumented immigrants who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will be affected, as there’s currently no fix in place ahead of the March 5 deadline
9 million children who are under the Children’s Health Insurance Program — whose parents usually earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private health coverage — will have less certainty about the future of their health care
About 1.3 million active-duty military will be expected to work potentially without pay. The military is currently paid through February 1.
In the 2013 government shutdown, about 850,000 government employees were furloughed each day — and there could be a similar number this time around
1.87 million civilian government workers could be exempt from furlough — including the workers at the Transportation Security Administration and food safety inspectors, border patrol officers and federal prison guards
Up to 417 national park sites could be closed, though the Trump administration is going to “try to allow limited access wherever possible,” Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift told CNN
19 Smithsonian museums could be closed
There’s a strong case to make that Trump is a big reason why the government just shut down
By Amber Phillips January 20 at 12:02 AM
The government is shutting down for the first time in more than four years, and President Trump has spent days trying to lay the blame on the Democrats.
Not looking good for our great Military or Safety & Security on the very dangerous Southern Border. Dems want a Shutdown in order to help diminish the great success of the Tax Cuts, and what they are doing for our booming economy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2018
But there is a strong case to be made that it’s the president’s actions (and lack thereof) that caused, or at least greatly exacerbated, the shutdown. In other words, Trump shares a sizable chunk of the blame.
Here’s why:
1. All of this is happening on his watch: This is the first shutdown with one party controlling all of Washington. Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, so how could Trump not get some of the blame for a shutdown? He’s (ostensibly) in control of his party.
A politically potent symbol to drive home that point: The government shut down on the first anniversary of his presidency.
A view of the crowd at the Capitol during the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20, 2017. (Bill O’Leary /The Washington Post)
When you layer on what Trump has said about shutdowns, it is fair to wonder if Trump actually wants one, or at least is okay with one if it happens. My colleagues reported in November he told confidants a shutdown could be good for him politically; a chance to flex his hard-line muscles on immigration. He’s also tweeted stuff like this:
either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good “shutdown” in September to fix mess!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017
The president’s aides said Friday that Trump was instrumental in bringing conservative House Republicans on board with the spending bill, and that he was “actively working ” to prevent a shutdown. He invited Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to the White House on Friday to talk about a deal. Schumer said he “even put a border wall on the table,” suggesting Trump could get money for the U.S.-Mexico border wall in exchange for keeping the government open. But Schumer said Saturday that Trump rejected that deal, the second bipartisan immigration deal in a week he’s rejected.
[If the government shuts down, here’s your cheat sheet on which party to blame]
2. No one in Washington seems to know what he wants: So, wait, if the president said in private he would be okay with a shutdown, but in public decried one, what did he actually want?
That is a mystery to even his allies in Congress. This week, Trump cast doubt on whether he would sign a short-term spending bill to keep the government’s lights on for another month, hours after his spokeswoman said he would. Hours before a precarious vote in the House of Representatives to avoid such a scenario, Trump pulled the rug out from under GOP leaders by seeming to take away their only leverage to get Democrats on board: funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2018
Trump also pushed back on his chief of staff’s statements by suggesting he had not backed off the notion of a border wall covering most of the 2,000 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it. Parts will be, of necessity, see through and it was never intended to be built in areas where there is natural protection such as mountains, wastelands or tough rivers or water…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2018
3. He torpedoed a deal on immigration right when it mattered most: Trump has also been extraordinarily inconsistent on what he wants on an issue that is impossible to separate from this shutdown: preventing the deportation of immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, known as “dreamers.”
He ended the Obama-era dreamer protections in September, tossing it to Congress to fix. Then he switched his position several times on whether he wanted Congress to find a permanent solution and/or what he wanted in exchange for it. (A border wall? Would a fence be okay? Ending the visa lottery program?)
Senators came up with a bipartisan deal they thought he could support. It included some money for a barrier on the border. In phone calls earlier in the day, these senators thought he was on board. When they went to the White House to present the deal, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) told the New York Times he found Trump almost automatically opposed to any deal.
Then the president reportedly asked why the deal had to let in people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, and then you-know-what really hit the fan.
4. “Shithole countries”: With two words, Trump caused an international stir and made it much more difficult for Democrats to negotiate with the president on even the shortest of spending deals. Their base was already frustrated Democrats did not extract dreamer protections in a December spending deal.
Suddenly, a vote even on a short-term spending bill without protections for young undocumented immigrants could be interpreted by liberals as a capitulation to Trump.
President Trump sits at his desk in February. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
This isn’t to say Trump is the only one who will get blamed for this shutdown. Republicans have spent the past few days casting Democrats as the villains. They are willing to vote against a spending bill over an unrelated issue, immigration.
The choice to fund the government by Friday is simple.
1) pass a noncontroversial, bipartisan bill to keep the government open
OR
2) Democrats manufacture a crisis & force a government shutdown over an unrelated issue that we have until at least March to resolve
— Leader McConnell (@SenateMajLdr) January 18, 2018
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The story must be told.
Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), points to recent history to make the case that Democrats are the ones to blame: In 2013, conservative Republicans refused to vote for a spending bill that did not defund Obamacare. The government shut down for 16 days, and polls showed a majority of Americans blamed Republicans.
“You take the party label off and watch how that’s played out,” Holmes said. “It’s never been good for the party that’s blocking the funding for reasons irrelevant to the funding.”
For right now, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll showed the opposite. On the eve of this shutdown, Americans say they’ll blame Republicans and Trump over Democrats. The reasons Trump is to blame are pretty clear.
More
t 12:01 am on Saturday, January 20, the federal government shut down.
Republicans and Democrats are still stuck in a standoff after failing to reach an immigration deal this week. House Republicans passed a bill on Thursday to fund the government for four weeks and extend the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years, after Congress had failed to reauthorize that program for the last four months.
But on a procedural vote late Friday, which needed 60 votes to advance the House spending bill, 45 Senate Democrats — and five Senate Republicans — rejected it.
Democrats, frustrated with President Trump’s unwillingness to accept a bipartisan proposal to address the nearly 700,000 immigrants in legal limbo after he pledged to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, felt they had no choice and no other leverage but to reject the House spending bill to force DACA negotiations. They were joined by several Republicans also working on a DACA fix and angry over the inability to cut a long-term funding deal for the military.
Republicans dug in to pit DACA recipients against CHIP, even though their majority had failed to make the program’s extension. But Democrats believe they have a compelling case for DACA after Trump’s latest racist tirade, calling some countries “shitholes” in an immigration meeting with lawmakers.
It’s a standoff, for now, with no easy resolution.
Having allowed for the first vote fail on the floor, triggering a shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made Democrats a counter offer: a shorter short-term spending bill that would keep the government open until February 8, with promise of immigration negotiations in that time.
“The government may be headed into a shutdown but the Senate has not shut down,” McConnell said. Now the mad scramble to fund the government and reopen its doors begins.
What does a federal shutdown actually mean?
A government shutdown means a lot of “nonessential” government activities suddenly cease. As Vox explained, it’s not unusual for Congress to go to the brink of a shutdown; it happened several times in Trump’s first year in office alone. But it’s rare they actually don’t make the deadline.
During shutdowns, federal employees are split into “essential” and “nonessential” groups. Nonessential employees receive furloughs: They stop getting paid and are off work until the shutdown is resolved. Essential workers also stop getting paid, but they still have to work. Usually when a shutdown is over, federal employees are paid back the salaries they went without.
A shutdown usually suspends a lot of government functions. Though the military, air traffic control, federal prisons, and Social Security and other benefit payments typically aren’t affected, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that the shutdown resulted in 120,000 fewer jobs and cut economic growth by 0.2 to 0.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013, the last time the government shut down.
The effects of the 2013 shutdown were pretty substantial:
– Tax refunds totaling almost $4 billion were delayed.
– The Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program went unfunded.
– Federal research activities at the National Institutes of Health (which lost about three-quarters of its employees), the National Science Foundation (which lost 98 percent of its workforce), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (which lost two-thirds) shut down nearly entirely; the CDC scaled back its monitoring of disease outbreaks.
– Environmental Protection Agency inspections halted at 1,200 locations.
– The Food and Drug Administration delayed approval of drugs and medical devices.
– The national parks shut down, resulting in $500 million in lost consumer spending from tourism.
– Reviews of veterans’ disability applications slowed to a halt, with nearly 20,000 applications per week not being evaluated.
So while shutdowns don’t usually result in senior citizens going without their Social Security checks, or shut down the military, it’s still a very serious matter.
For Congress, there’s now a mad scramble to end the shutdown
To end a government shutdown, Congress has to pass a spending bill.
That means Congress can 1) pass the appropriations bills, likely in an omnibus, which just crams together 11 appropriations bills into one spending package; 2) pass a “continuing resolution” (CR), which would fund the government at its current levels, basically buying more time to negotiate the actual appropriations bills (this is what Congress has done since last October); or 3) pass a “CRomnibus,” which is a combination of the two, extending the deadline on certain more contentious appropriations — like for the Department of Homeland Security — and passing a spending bill on the rest.
McConnell has already proposed another CR — one slightly shorter than the one that failed on the floor earlier this evening.
But it’s important to note that Democrats voted down a short-term spending bill Friday over stalled immigration negotiations, and it’s unlikely they’d vote for one without some kind of agreement on the future of the DACA program.
After months of inaction, immigration negotiations have intensified in recent days, but not without tribulations. President Donald Trump and Republican leadership continue to engage hardline immigration hawks who have shown no interest in compromise. Trump reportedly told Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who occupy the most conservative spaces in the immigration debate, that he wouldn’t support a proposal without their blessing.
That’s a serious red flag for Democrats, whose votes are needed to pass anything on immigration. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to push for immigration negotiations to be kept outside of spending talks.
But with a shutdown hanging overhead, it’s possible Democrats will agree to a shorter CR with the assurance that an immigration bill will be struck in the interim.
Let the blame games begin
Both parties have spent the past few days trying to set up the other side to take the blame for the shutdown, as Vox previously explained:
Senate Republicans are already prepping plans for the weekend, if the government does shut down, to force vulnerable Senate Democrats to take uncomfortable votes, as Politico reported.
Democrats say that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House — of course it’s their fault if they can’t keep the government open. Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of withholding their needed votes in the Senate in order to press for a resolution to the impasse in the immigration debate, even at the expense of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The truth is, Republicans didn’t even have the votes to keep the government open on their own. But Democrats also weren’t going to let the government stay open without a DACA deal, even if Republicans had the votes. After Trump blew up the DACA talks in the “shithole” meeting, they felt they had no choice and saw the spending bill as the best leverage.
Democrats have been saying — as Republicans knew — that tying a DACA deal to a spending bill was the only way they could be assured of its success. Immigration hawks are trying to blow up the emerging deal from a bipartisan group of senators. Cotton, one of the hawks who have Trump’s ear, on Friday called the proposal from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) “preposterous.”
The hardliners, and Republican leaders, are digging in. Democrats have already decided that now is the time to force the DACA issue. The government won’t reopen until one side feels the squeeze — and blinks.
The blame game, however, has already begun. The White House is coined this the “Schumer shutdown.”
As for Schumer, he says only Trump is responsible: “This will be called the Trump shutdown.”