US LAWMAKERS WILL launch a last-ditch bid today to end a budget impasse before hundreds of thousands of federal workers are forced to start the work week at home with no pay.
The impact of the shutdown that began at midnight on Friday (5am Irish time) has been largely limited so far, closing sites like New York’s Statue of Liberty, but the effect will be acute if the stalemate runs into tomorrow.
Republicans and Democrats have traded bitter recriminations over who is to blame for the failure to pass a stop-gap funding measure by a 20 January deadline, a year to the day since Donald Trump took office as US president.
Highlighting the deep political polarization, crowds estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets of major US cities yesterday to march against the president and his policies.
Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell today set a key vote for a funding measure for 1am (6am Irish time) tomorrow, with both houses of Congress set to reconvene today.
“I assure you we will have the vote at 1am on Monday unless there is a desire to have it sooner,” he said in a statement.
At the heart of the dispute is the thorny issue of undocumented immigration.
Democrats have accused Republicans of poisoning chances of a deal and pandering to Trump’s populist base by refusing to fund a program that protects 700,000 “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants who arrived as children – from deportation.
Trump, in return, has said Democrats are “far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border”.
The shutdown’s effects meanwhile are set to intensify.
Essential federal services and military activity are continuing, but even active duty troops will not be paid until a deal is reached to reopen the US government.
‘Holding pattern’
There have been four government shutdowns since 1990. In the last one in 2013, more than 800,000 government workers were put on temporary leave.
“We’re just in a holding pattern. We just have to wait and see. It’s scary,” Noelle Joll, a 50-year-old furloughed US government employee, told AFP in Washington.
A deal had appeared likely on Friday afternoon when Trump - who has touted himself as a master negotiator – seemed to be close to an agreement with Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on protecting Dreamers.
But no such compromise was in the language that reached Congress for a stop-gap motion to keep the government open for four more weeks while a final arrangement is discussed. And Republicans failed to win enough Democratic support to bring it to a vote.
Congress reconvened for a rare Saturday session, where leaders of both sides were meant to hammer out their differences to prevent the shutdown from stretching into tomorrow. Instead, they traded accusations of responsibility for the shutdown.
Schumer said trying to negotiate with Trump ”was like negotiating with Jell-O”.
“It’s impossible to negotiate with a constantly moving target,” he said. “President Trump is so mercurial it’s been impossible to get him to agree to anything.”
Meanwhile, McConnell said Schumer “took the extraordinary step” of preventing the legislation from passing and thus “plunging the country into this totally avoidable mess”.
Anti-Trump protests
Republicans have a tenuous one-seat majority in the Senate, and on Friday needed to lure some Democrats to their side to get a 60 vote supermajority to bring the motion forward. They fell ten votes short.
The measure brought to Congress would have extended federal funding until 16 February and authorised for six years a health insurance program for poor children – a long-time Democratic objective.
But it left out any action on the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, that affects Dreamers.
White House officials insisted there was no urgency to fix DACA, which expires 5 March.
As US lawmakers wrangled over government funding, protesters turned out in cities including Los Angeles, New York and Washington to express their opposition to Trump and their support for women’s rights.
Protestors hoisted placards with messages including “Fight like a girl” and “A woman’s place is in the White House” and “Elect a clown, expect a circus”.
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