Congress to Pursue Divergent Paths to Reopening Government, but Stalemate No Closer to Resolution

Congress will take up legislation in the coming days to reopen the federal government after a new offer from President Donald Trump, but divergent efforts in the House and Senate look destined to go nowhere, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers facing a second missed paycheck at week’s end with the impasse no closer to resolution.

The Senate, headed by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will consider a proposal Trump announced Saturday that would trade temporary protections for some undocumented immigrants and others for the $5.7 billion the president seeks for his border wall. The proposal would reopen the government through Sept. 30 while funding a variety of other immigration security measures and spending billions on hurricane and wildfire disaster relief. But Democrats have rejected the plan, so it appears unlikely to garner the 60 votes necessary to advance.

The House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), is expected to pass a series of spending bills that would reopen portions of the government that have nothing to do with the wall. The legislation will include some security priorities supported by both parties, including a total of about $1 billion for immigration judges and ports of entry along the border. But the House legislation is dead on arrival in the Senate, where McConnell has made clear that he will not advance any spending bills Trump won’t sign.

The partial government shutdown, already the longest in U.S. history, entered its 31st day on Monday.

Even if Trump’s proposal fails in the Senate, Republicans hope to use the development to put the onus on Democrats and cast them as the ones who are standing in the way of solving the shutdown, after a series of public polls have shown Trump blamed more than Democrats for the impasse.

“Democrats campaigned on working within Washington and ‘getting things done!’ How is that working out?” Trump tweeted on Monday.

Trump also planned to meet with conservative leaders on Tuesday to sell them on his plan, according to an official familiar with the meeting, following criticism from some on the right who have characterized it as “amnesty” for unauthorized immigrants.

For their part, House Democrats have been discussing the need to set out in greater detail their own priorities for border security, to show what they support not just what they oppose, an effort that is expected to be fleshed out this week and could take the shape of a public announcement or legislation to fund the Homeland Security Department, which has been shut down along with dozens of other agencies since Dec. 22. The Democratic priorities could include funding for things like sensors, drones and more customs officers – but no money for Trump’s wall, aides said.

The shutdown is beginning to hurt the American economy amid a number of emerging threats to its health, from Trump’s ongoing trade war to slowing expansions in China and Germany. JPMorgan projected that the economy is losing at least $1.5 billion a week from the shutdown, and financial elites gathered this week in Davos, Switzerland, have expressed alarm that another recession may be on the horizon.

The Trump administration has taken certain steps to blunt the impact of the shutdown, effects of which will nevertheless multiply over time, including at airports, where Transportation Security Administration employees are increasingly calling out sick. The TSA says that as of Sunday, 10 percent of employees are taking unscheduled absences, compared with 3.1 percent a year ago. “Many employees are reporting that they are not able to report to work, due to financial limitations,” the agency said.

Without action by Congress and Trump, hundreds of thousands of federal employees are also set to miss their second paycheck on Friday. On Sunday, the National Governors Association sent a letter to congressional leaders, saying some states are running out of money to pay federal welfare benefits used by 1 million adults and 2.5 million children, with North Carolina expected to exhaust its funding in early February.

The Trump administration also provided money for states to administer food stamps through February, but it has said it cannot guarantee that benefits would continue if the shutdown stretches into March. It is also not clear whether the IRS, working with 60 percent of its overall staff, is prepared for tax filing season to begin this month.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) released legislation on Sunday to prohibit landlords from evicting federal workers or contractors hurt by the shutdown, although that bill was not expected to pass.

Trump’s proposal Saturday represented his first attempt since the shutdown began to offer a broader deal that would involve border security and other parts of the immigration system. The president offered three years of deportation protections for immigrants who were brought to or stayed in the United States illegally as children and had qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which the president terminated earlier in his tenure. (A federal court has delayed the end of the program.)

Democrats rejected the proposal from the start, saying the government cannot be held hostage and must be reopened before negotiations on immigration policy can begin. They added that they would not trade a temporary measure for a permanent wall and pointed out that Trump was now only offering to temporarily prolong a program he tried to kill. Trump also offered to back off plans to end a program, known as a temporary protected status, that has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to come to the United States after fleeing natural disasters and violent conflict back home. All told, about 1 million immigrants covered under DACA and TPS would be eligible for temporary relief, the administration said.

Even as his proposal was rejected by Democrats, Trump faced fire from some conservatives who derided his immigration overtures as “amnesty,” although the opposition did not appear to be as widespread as last year when similar complaints torpedoed an even bigger deal that would have created a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants while also fully funding Trump’s border wall.

Trump’s offer, followed by its swift rejection by Democrats and the far right, left the shutdown looking as intractable as ever – even while serving as evidence that Republicans are growing uneasy about allowing the shutdown to continue indefinitely. Democrats have maintained a united front throughout the standoff, and after Pelosi released a letter last week suggesting that Trump delay his Jan. 29 State of the Union address unless the shutdown has been resolved, McConnell encouraged Trump to try to shift the debate by making his new offer, which McConnell promised to bring to a vote – even though the Senate leader had previously said that only a bipartisan agreement would break the impasse.

The shutdown is affecting about a quarter of federal agencies, limited in scope because Congress passed legislation funding the Pentagon and some other major agencies including the Health and Human Services Department. Medicare and Social Security benefits are not affected, since they flow independent of congressional appropriations.

Trump long claimed that the border wall would be paid for by Mexico, before he started demanding billions from U.S. taxpayers to build it. The $5.7 billion he is asking for now would pay for about 230 new miles of wall.