The NPR Politics Podcast - Government Shuts Down After Senate Fails To Pass Spending Bill

Episode Date: January 20, 2018

The federal government is now in a partial shutdown. Funding ran out just after midnight, after the Senate failed to pass a short-term spending bill. This episode, host/congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell and White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

One, two, three. Hello everybody, this is the Jung family. We're waiting outside the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. for the NPR Politics Live Show. This podcast was recorded at... 1247 a.m. on Saturday, January 20th. Things may have changed by this time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with a special late night edition of the show. It's after midnight, but we're here in the studio because funding for the federal government has lapsed. A little after midnight, the Senate made it official. In three-fifths of the senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is not agreed to. That's when a bill funding the government through mid-February failed on a key Senate vote. Now the White House and top Republicans in Congress are blaming Democrats for political brinksmanship. And Democrats are saying none of this would be happening if President Trump had not rejected a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress.

I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. All right. And here we are. So I'm at NPR. Kelsey, you are in your booth at the Capitol. Where are they still on the Senate floor or are they off the Senate? They are still on the Senate floor doing a procedural vote that allows them to keep voting on different options for short term spending bills. So they are going to be doing this for a little bit longer. The hope is to be off of the floor shortly here. OK, so while they do that, let's just walk through the last

couple hours on the Senate floor. This vote initially came up around 10 p.m. and it hung open for a long time. Kelsey, walk us through what exactly happened. Yeah, so they opened that vote at about 10, 13 p.m. and they didn't close it until after midnight. It was 1216 when they were done. We knew far before that that they did not have the votes to pass the spending bill, but there were all of these little huddles that were happening in little corners of the Senate floor. There was a big group of people all surrounding Lindsey Graham who seemed like he was telling a story. And Ted Cruz was telling jokes in another corner with about five or six of his other colleagues. And people were kind of moving

back and forth. At one point in time, we saw Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer go to a back room where typically we see lawmakers go when they're receiving phone calls from somebody big and important. We don't know exactly who they talked to. They weren't in there long. They came back and still no agreement. It has been a, like you said, will they, won't they kind of day. It's been a lot of waiting. And we're going to take a step back

and walk through everything that happened today. But first on that vote, it was open for a while. The question was, would they figure out some sort of literal last minute agreement? They didn't. And McConnell and Schumer really went at each other in the kind of Senate way that you go at each other, giving a formal speech. But my good friend, before you drive the shiv in, my very good friends, the friends across the aisle just seem like they've made a big mistake. So first, let's take

a listen to McConnell. And Mr. President, what we've just witnessed on the floor was a cynical decision by Senate Democrats to shove aside millions of Americans for the sake of irresponsible political games. The government shutdown was 100 percent avoidable, completely avoidable. Now it is imminent. All because Senate Democrats chose to filibuster a non-controversial funding bill that contains nothing, not a thing they do not support. And Chuck Schumer responded saying that it's Republicans who control all the branches of government and then appealing directly to President Trump. Mr. President, President Trump, if you are listening, I am urging you, please take yes for an answer. The way things went today, the way you turned from a bipartisan deal, it's almost as if you were rooting for a shutdown.

And now we'll have one. And the blame should crash entirely on President Trump's shoulders. This will be called the Trump shutdown. And can one of you just give us the quick 30-second update on what exactly is in this bill, in case anybody's drawing a blank on it at this point in the storyline? This bill would keep the government open for four more weeks. It would keep spending levels exactly the same until February 16th. But it would also have a six-year extension of the very popular bipartisan Children's Health Insurance Program. It's that program that gives insurance coverage to kids whose families make more than is accepted for the Medicaid threshold, but not enough to afford insurance coverage. So, Scott, how is the White House responding to all of this? Well, the president, you know, invited Senator Schumer

over to the White House earlier today. They had a lengthy conversation. They both described it as productive and said they were making some headway, but there was no big breakthrough. After the vote, a very defiant tone. There was a statement from the press secretary, not surprisingly, saying the blame for the shutdown belongs on the Democrats, and saying that Democrats had shown, quote, the behavior of obstructionist losers, not legislators. The White House also says they're not going to negotiate the fate of the so-called dreamers until Democrats agree to reopen the government. Kelsey, McConnell said this bill contains nothing, not a thing Democrats do not support. We've talked about this a lot the last

few weeks, but can you remind everyone the relationship between a DACA solution and this government funding bill? It's been several months now since the idea of pairing DACA with a spending bill first originated. And for a really long time, Democrats and Republicans all agreed that this was a good idea. The idea was that if you put these things together, it made a really long time, Democrats and Republicans all agreed that this was a good idea. The idea was that if you put these things together, it made a really big package that made it really hard for people to vote against. If you wanted some pieces of it, say you're a conservative who likes military spending, that would be in there for you. If you were a Democrat who was really, really dedicated to making sure DREAMers were protected, that would be in there for you.

But what it ended up doing was creating a really difficult situation, in large part because the president couldn't really come to a place where he said what exactly he wanted. And so it looked like they were getting close on a spending deal when DACA just kept falling apart. And, you know, one thing that we keep talking about here is blame. And that has been the theme of the day. It has been a branding here is blame. And that has been the theme of the day. It has been a branding exercise for blame. But the interesting thing was that even though the vote was close, it was not strictly the kind of party line vote we're used to seeing. There were five Democrats who voted to

keep the government open. Four of those are Democrats up for reelection this year in states that Donald Trump carried. And the fifth is Doug Jones, who's not up for reelection this year in states that Donald Trump carried. And the fifth is Doug Jones, who's not up for reelection, but who's in a very red state of Alabama. Then we also had four Republicans who voted against the short-term funding extension. Two of those, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, were part of that unsuccessful effort to broker a compromise on DACA that the president rejected. So, Kelsey, you talked about the fact that so much of today was preemptively blaming the other side. Let's take a couple minutes here and walk through a day that really was filled with political brinksmanship. It started this morning when the White House was preemptively blaming Senate Democrats for a looming shutdown.

Here's budget director Mick Mulvaney. I have to laugh when people say that, oh, we control the House and the Senate and the White House. Why can't you get this done? You know as well as anybody that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass an appropriations bill, right? You know that. OK, so when you only have 51 votes in the Senate, then you have to have Democrat support in order to keep the government to fund the government. Republicans were calling it the Schumer shutdown. But then early in the afternoon, President Trump surprised everyone

by inviting Schumer to the White House. And for a while, it seemed like there could be a breakthrough. We had a long and detailed meeting. We made some progress, but we still have a good number of disagreements. The discussions will continue. But even as leaders were shuffling

from meeting to meeting, Democrats did their own share of preemptive framing and blaming. California Senator Kamala Harris said this wouldn't be a problem if Trump had stuck to his initial promise from last week that he would sign any DACA deal Congress came up with. His history with his word has proven to be consistent. He didn't keep his word. He didn't keep his word. And so he rejected it. And so here we are now on the eve of what might have to be the shutdown of the United States government. This was at a rally outside the Capitol with a lot of high profile Democrats. And during that rally, independent Senator Bernie Sanders said something you've been hearing from a

lot of Democrats, including Chuck Schumer over the last few days, saying, hey, Republicans are at fault here. They're the ones holding all the cards. We have a government in which the U.S. Senate controlled by Republicans, the House controlled by Republicans, the White House controlled by Republicans. And we want a government that functions not on a month-to-month basis, but on a basis which addresses the real crises facing the American people. After that, everybody voted, and you know the rest. So let's talk through the possible outcomes here. Right now, funding has lapsed for the federal government, though by and large, it seems like that wouldn't really fully kick in until Monday. Right, Scott? offices are closed on Saturday and Sunday anyway. But the shutdown will begin to be felt more and more the longer it lasts if it goes into the work week. Now, Mick Mulvaney, the budget director, who's kind of overseeing this shutdown process, tried to reassure people today that essential

functions of government will still go on. The military will still do their thing. The border patrol will keep patrolling the border. The TSA agents will keep patting folks down at airports. But none of those employees, nor the ones who've been furloughed, will be getting paychecks. And that will start to hurt if this shutdown runs through the week, because the next federal payday is scheduled to be next Friday. Kelsey, there were a lot of rumors throughout the day that one short-term solution would be a bill funding the government for just a matter of days only so that negotiations could continue. At the end of the night, Mitch McConnell said that this weekend he'll introduce something first proposed by Lindsey Graham that would fund the government for three weeks instead of four

weeks. What is the difference? I mean, obviously a week's a difference, but why would that matter? Why not just go with the original bill? Well, for Republicans, that would be appealing because it would get them past the president's State of the Union. For Democrats, I don't really see what the benefit is for them here, other than to say that they made their point, that they are willing to stand firm on DACA and that they think that, you know, for some reason, this three-week situation would give them more time to negotiate and would somehow be better. But it would seem to kind of contradict what we just heard Senator Sanders saying, that we need a longer-term

agreement. There's a lot going on here where people are trying to figure out the best way to get out of this situation without being blamed and with more leverage in the future. And that is always a dangerous position to be in because it's not clear right now what the right answer is. And there's a lot of different stuff wrapped up here. This measure, among other things, would have extended the children's health insurance program for six years. That's something that does have bipartisan support, but has been in this holding pattern since it expired at the end of September. And states have been working through on a patchwork basis, continuing it.

Some extra money has come along in short-term doses, but this would have been a six-year extension. That's something most people want, but Democrats were angry at Republicans for putting in there as kind of like a sweetener to the deal and by and large rejected that. So Bob Casey from Pennsylvania is by and large one of the most laid back and not super interesting senators to quote. But just listen to how angry he was about this chip provision. I think they were diabolical about using using the chip program as a weapon instead of passing it back in September and October. They didn't do a damn thing for kids for all these months, over 100 days.

Now all of a sudden they pretend like they care. I think in the long run they're going to get tagged hard in 18, and I'm going to make sure I do it. Yeah. We heard a lot of that from Democrats. Democrats are mad about this. And I think that's just part of the

larger picture here, is this government shutdown is really just a symptom of how much frustration there is in the government, especially among Democrats. But there's just no love lost between the parties and none of the common courtesies. Republicans who had ignored Schipp all during the fall while they were busy passing their tax cut bill would now try to use that as a weapon against the Democrats. It was really the last straw for a lot of typically kind of laid back Democratic lawmakers. Yeah. And I talked to a lot of Republicans who are just mad that they feel like they were giving Democrats what they asked for and it wasn't good enough for Democrats. And there's just like I said, just so much blame to go around here. And both sides are mad and they're both dug in. And the Republican argument on DACA, too, has been this goes until March. At the moment, it goes beyond March because a federal judge has blocked

the expiration of DACA. And they've said we can deal with this soon. We don't need to have this done right now. And this is a false premise that it has to be done now. Yeah, that's something that I heard directly from almost every Republican I spoke with today. That wasn't necessarily where they were before, though. Just as a reminder, we talked to a lot of Republicans two weeks ago who viewed this deadline as the deadline. And they were trying to get a deal done. But when it became clear that a DACA deal was not happening, you started to hear a lot of Republicans say, well, we wanted that to be the deadline. But in reality, we have more time and we should take the time we need to get something done the right way. And we should say there are people every day whose DACA protection does expire in the interim. Absolutely. And that is something that Senator Dick Durbin brings up frequently, is that there are people who are losing out on

protections on a daily basis. So, Scott, we should note, I guess, it is now the one-year anniversary of President Trump being sworn into office, January 20th. Yeah, not the way the president wanted to be spending his anniversary. According to Bloomberg, he was planning to attend a high-dollar fundraising anniversary party at his private resort down in Palm Beach this weekend. Instead, he's had to scrap the plan to travel to Florida and preside over this government shutdown now. He is still scheduled to make his trip to Davos, Switzerland, this coming week for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. But you know, there were real questions floating around today. Can Air Force One fly during a government shutdown? Can the Secret Service go and stake out the Davos meeting in the case of

a government shutdown? The answer to those apparently is yes. But just the kind of questions you wouldn't want to be having to answer on what should be a celebratory anniversary for this president. Kerry Johnson did point out in our live podcast last night that among the essential employees in a government shutdown would be Robert Mueller's investigative team. So they can continue to do their work. Lots of people in the federal government do continue to do their work. You know, and it's also conceivable that they could have a deal before then, because right before we started recording here, we heard that the House is planning to be in session Saturday.

And at 9 a.m., they will be in session and there will be votes tomorrow. So it's possible they could get this resolved before Monday. So if they don't, though, I have two big questions that I'm really curious what you think, how they'll play out. First of all, is how does President Trump handle this? What does he say? How does he message his argument? And is there a strategy or is it just going to be the tweet to tweet approach to life that we've seen him do and, you know, basically everything else. I think one of the real challenges here has been that President Trump has been unpredictable. I mean, the whiplash one could get between the meeting last Tuesday, where they left

the cameras in to show, you know, the diplomat Trump negotiating with Republicans and Democrats and getting high marks for it. And then the meeting two days later, where he used a vulgar slur to talk about countries in Africa. The same sort of thing has been true on his Twitter feed between, you know, praising a positive meeting with Chuck Schumer and then what we saw Friday night from the press secretary calling Democrats, you know, obstructionist losers. So I think it's very hard to predict how Trump will respond, and it's entirely possible he'll respond inconsistently from day to day or even hour to hour. So, Kelsey, the other big question, and it does matter to the policy here because it's going to affect how both sides play this.

Who is going to get the blame? Is this going to be for voters, the Schumer shutdown or the Trump shutdown? Well, there was some polling that showed about 33, 34 percent blamed Democrats. Somewhere in the 20s blamed Republicans and somewhere in the 20s blamed Trump. So I guess in the aggregate, they blame Republicans. But I do think it's kind of interesting that people differentiate between Republicans writ large and the president, who is in fact a Republican. And, you know, Mick Mulvaney talked about this a little bit today when he was just discussing what the shutdown would look like. He says he's

going to take pains to minimize the effects of the shutdown and says that's a contrast to what the Obama administration did during the last shutdown in 2013. There's no other way to describe it, but the Obama administration weaponized the shutdown in 2013. They could have made the shutdown in 2013 much less impactful, but they chose to make it worse. The only conclusion I can draw is they did so for political purposes. Now, one way to look at that is just that's the actions of responsible government. But a cynic might look at that and say, that's what you do if you're not entirely sure Democrats are going to shoulder the blame for this shutdown. If you think Republicans might get some of the blame, then you're going to have an incentive as a Republican administrator to

try to minimize the effects. Sounds like a key thing we will be talking about early next week. And I think it's after one in the morning. So, you know, I don't think there's much else to say right now. Nowhere I'd rather be at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning than podcasting with you guys. Hey, I'm just so glad to be talking with both Scots at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning. It's a rare experience. I know. I'm excited. Stick around. You can talk to Scott Simon.

That's true. In only a few hours. He'll be in in a few hours. Run a trio of Scott's. All right. So we're going to end it on that. We will be covering this all weekend on your local public radio station, on NPR.org, on NPR One. Not sure we'll be podcasting again this weekend, but we will certainly be back in your feed Monday with the latest on this story. If you haven't heard it yet, check out your podcast feed for the live show we did last night at the Warner Theater in D.C. It was a lot of fun,

and it's a big picture look at the entire last year of the Trump administration. So that's there. Stay tuned for whatever's going to happen next with this. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Scott Horslake. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon