The NPR Politics Podcast - Senate Reaches Deal To End Shutdown

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Three days into a partial government shutdown, the Senate has passed a bill to fund the government through February 8th. The bill does not include a fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which had been a key demand for many Democrats. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to bring DACA legislation up for a vote soon. 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

Hi, this is Reese Vaughn calling from San Diego, California. I'm coming to you from the backseat of my mom's car, listening to NPR on the radio as we drive home from school. This podcast was recorded at 1.56 p.m. Eastern on Monday, January 22nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, the NPR app or at your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. The shutdown has been shut down. This afternoon, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill funding the federal government through February

8th. The bill did not address the Defer action for childhood arrivals program, which had been the key demand for many of the Democrats who voted to block funding last week. As we tape this podcast, there's still another Senate vote and a House vote ahead, but it looks like the shutdown is ending on its first full workday and without the results Democrats wanted. We will walk through exactly what happened. 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. Well, hello again, everybody. Hi. So it seems like we were all here just a couple of nights ago. Yeah, we were we were in this same group of people around one in the morning, early Saturday, talking about a shutdown that had just begun.

And now it's over. So, Kelsey, what happened in between? In between, there was a lot of standing around, waiting around, disagreeing, and then all of a sudden resolution. As things tend to happen up here in the Capitol, I was actually talking with another reporter about this and that this shutdown kind of felt like it was just a long wait and not even that long. Democrats walked away from their position pretty quickly once it looked like things were just not looking good for them. So let's do this like an episode of The Crown and start with a big dramatic moment and then work backwards. OK, so here's Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor this afternoon. The Republican leader and I have come to an arrangement. We will vote today to reopen

the government to continue negotiating a global agreement with the commitment that if an agreement isn't reached by February the 8th, the Senate will immediately proceed to consideration of legislation dealing with DACA. Okay, that's today. Scott, real quick, can you bring us up to speed on how this shutdown began? Yes, there was a vote late Friday in the Senate to pass a four-week stopgap spending bill. It was paired with an extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program as a sweetener to Democrats. But it failed. The spending bill got 51 votes. It needed 60 to pass. And so as of midnight, the government spending authority ran out and we've been in a partial

shutdown ever since. And the big issue for Democrats was that they were not going to vote for a funding bill without a permanent fix for the expiring DACA program. OK, so, Kelsey, from that moment when the vote failed on Saturday, suddenly this bipartisan group of senators starts meeting. What happened next? Who were these senators? What were they trying to do? Well, it's a group of senators that are calling themselves the Common Sense Caucus. This is how they have personally branded. As we've talked about already, this was like a very extensive branding exercise on both sides of the Capitol. People trying to make this somebody else's problem and trying to own the solution.

So the solution seems to have come from this group of about 20 Democrats and Republicans who were having their own side meetings separate from leadership over the weekend. They met for about three hours on Saturday. They met for a couple of hours on Sunday. And when they left their meeting on Sunday, they said that they thought they had a breakthrough. Their group was kind of led, if there was really a leader, by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins from Maine. And then on the Democratic side, we saw people like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Now, you might notice we talk about Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Manchin in the same breath a lot. And that is because they are both people who are up for reelection in states won by President Trump. So a key thing here that we are going to get into is the fact that the dynamics that changed so that Democrats shifted their vote to vote for

this new bill really aren't that much. Not much has changed. It seemed like a lot of Democrats wanted an off ramp. Yeah, virtually nothing changed. Yeah. I mean, this is essentially the exact same bill as they voted against, just shorter. And now they'll say that Democrats will say that that somehow gives them more leverage. But I really don't see how that's the case. Scott, I think one thing that really took Democrats by surprise is that as they made this political calculation to basically force a shutdown over this key issue for them of of protecting people in the DACA program. so confident that President Trump would rant and rave and go on Twitter and go talk to reporters and just say and do things that would make voters associate this with him. How would you characterize President Trump's weekend?

He was very quiet, very low key. There were a couple of tweets, one where he called on Senate Republicans to invoke the nuclear option and just do away with the filibuster, which was not what Senate Republicans wanted to hear and certainly not a course they followed. But he stayed pretty much invisible throughout the weekend. It's true that the Trump shutdown hashtag was getting a little more traction than the Schumer shutdown hashtag. Despite the alliteration. That's right. Even though Schumer shutdown rolls off the tongue a little bit more smoothly. But Trump certainly did not do the Democrats his usual favors here.

Yeah. So, Scott, who was talking at the White House and what were they saying? Mick Mulvaney was very much out in front. He's the White House budget director and the Office of Management and Budget was the arm of the White House that was sort of responsible for managing the shutdown. His basic premise was we're going to make this as painless as possible, in contrast to what the Obama administration had done back in 2013, where they really tried to make the shutdown sort of as visible as possible. And then the other person that was out in front was Mark Short, the White House legislative director, who was kind of doing some shuttle diplomacy and back and forth to the hill and negotiating. I saw Mark Short on the Hill more in the past couple of days

than I think that I have seen him in a while. He was really engaged on definitely on taxes and health care, but he was in the thick of it through the entire weekend on this. He has become a pretty familiar face on the Hill to people who kind of stand in the hallways like I do all day long. And Kelsey, something that Mark Short and Mick Mulvaney and President Trump were saying, but a lot of Republicans in Congress were saying as well, was something very similar to what we heard here from Tom Cotton. Shutting down the government and depriving American citizens of services because you want amnesty for illegal immigrants is a massive political blunder. Kelsey, this is something a lot of Republicans were saying and it really unnerved Democrats. It unnerved them and also made them really angry because the Democrats on some level, I know you talked to a lot of them about this, felt like there was a calculation here. It was a miscalculation in some ways, too, that they didn't want this to be associated with supporting illegal immigration.

But what they were really mad about is that up to this point, there had been this broad agreement that the DACA population was somehow different than other people who were in the country illegally. There was a feeling that the DACA population is somehow very different because they were brought here as children. It's different because they should be held harmless because it wasn't their choice to break the law. And for the Republicans to start referring to them as a legal immigration problem, it was really hard for Democrats and it made them really mad. It made them worry that a DACA solution might be further away than it was before the shutdown started.

Even though polls do suggest that a wide majority of Americans, including Republicans, do feel sympathy for the DACA population and really do want to provide some safeguards for this population. Right. And Republicans today are saying that they want a DACA fix. And so it's been a little bit confusing in that regard. Where are things are going to go on DACA? I know we heard what this kind of convoluted explanation is of how they're going to get to a DACA vote eventually. And maybe there are commitments about certain types of votes and maybe not. But I don't think that the activists are particularly satiated by this solution. Oh, my email inbox is filled with angry notes from activists who are not at all satisfied. But I guess I would just like to inject a little note of caution here that I think it's really hard to know what the outcome of this is until we get three weeks down the road. If three weeks from now, Democrats have actually secured some kind of protection for the dreamers, then I think this will seem like a good strategy where they got the protection they needed, and they didn't have the

pain and the political harm of leaving the government shut down for an extended period of time. If, on the other hand, three weeks from now, they've come away empty-handed, which is what a lot of the activists fear because it's happened before, then this will look like just a complete capitulation with nothing to show for it. In a way, this gentleman's agreement that has been offered here is kind of the way the Senate used to function, right? I mean, this is the way we used to have a lot of these kind of side deals that weren't codified in legislation, and there was nothing you could really point to that was definitive. But it is the way the legislature worked. And we've seen that trust. We've seen that ability to do those kind of side deals

evaporate in recent years. There's that trust word again. We've been talking about that a lot lately. What really struck me after the vote is how much Democrats just did not want to talk at all. I was standing down there by the Congress train where we always mention we get our best quotes. And it was just a parade of Democrats walking by who who had downtrodden looks on their faces, who were a little bit snippy, who just didn't want to talk or answer questions at all. So I think there's a couple different camps to break Democrats into here. There's the camp of Democrats who thought this was a bad idea from the beginning. And that includes Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp, who I think we contractually at this point

have to say together in one breath, just because they are two of the 10 Democrats running for reelection this year in states that President Trump won in 2016. Then you had a group of Democrats and in Bernie Sanders case, an independent two caucuses with Democrats who were very insistent for a while now that Democrats should not vote for a spending bill unless it included a permanent fix for DACA. And not coincidentally, I think many of these Democrats are the ones who are mentioned as possible presidential contenders in 2020. And most of them still voted no today. And a lot of their advisors were really frustrated with Democrats arguing that they were just folding quickly without getting anything they demanded. And that, you know, saying we're not going to

vote for a spending bill until we get X and then voting for the spending bill without getting X really hurts them long term. And what's interesting to me here is this was a huge swing. I mean, from Friday night until midday today, we saw 30 votes shift from one to the other. Now, two of those are Republican votes, but that means it was 28 Democrats changed sides. As you said, Scott, there were only 10 Democrats who were up for reelection in 2018 in red states that Trump carried. The other two besides Manchin and Heitkamp are McCaskill in Missouri and Joe Donnelly in Indiana. But there was a whole lot of other Democrats who changed teams here. And I think that was the third camp that I forgot to say when I said you can divide these into three camps and then talked about two camps. The third camp would be a lot of the Democrats who did vote no on Friday, but who seemed generally uncertain about, you know, put aside the fact that every single Democrat in the Democratic caucus in the House and Senate deeply wants a DACA solution, feels like Dreamers should stay in this country and feels like that fix is long overdue. They were worried about making that the focal point of a shutdown fight. They were worried about the attacks that Republicans proceeded to deliver, saying you're shutting the government down over illegal immigrants.

And frankly, there was some frustration from a lot of members saying that Democrats from more deep blue states, Democrats who were trying to run nationally one day, were forcing an issue and putting some of their colleagues in more vulnerable states and red states in danger. You know, something Heitkamp said to me today was that at the end of the day, the thing that matters at the polls is whether or not you got results and that her expectation and hope is that results will come from this. And it's funny, I'm sitting here in the Capitol and somebody just sent me a tweet from Susan Collins that she just put up where she says, today we saw the power of the center

in the U.S. Senate. Joe Manchin and I worked hard or very hard in leading the effort of the Common Sense Coalition, a group of 25 Republicans, Democrats and an independent who proposed the compromise that ended the government shutdown. So it's back to that branding and taking credit for the fixing that seems to be spreading like wildfire here. Right. And there was a lot of that on the Senate floor. An interesting amount of it, I thought, given the fact that a stalemate had shut down the federal government over the last few days. This is not the thing you spike the football on. Right. Dick Durbin, Illinois Democrat, who has been pushing for a DREAM Act for more than a decade at this point spoke to that right before the vote. What I have seen here on the floor of the Senate

in the last few days is something we have not seen for years. Constructive, bipartisan conversations and dialogue on the floor, not just about this issue, which is obviously front and center, but about the future of this institution and what the Senate will be from this point forward. That to me has been encouraging because it says to me that we do have an opportunity to work together. So, Scott, the Senate feels like it is going to have a legitimate substantive debate on this issue. There's a key question of what would happen in the House if the Senate did pass it. But I think the bigger key question is what happens from the White House's perspective,

because, again, throughout this entire DACA debate, President Trump has changed his mind from day to day. Schumer over the weekend memorably said that negotiating with Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O. I've never negotiated with my Jell-O. Have you? I just usually slurp it down. But I think the harder hurdle to cross, though, will be in the House. I think if they manage to get a bill through the Senate and through the House, I think the president will sign it. The House is a real question mark, because remember, the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill, a sweeping one back in 2013, never even got a vote in the House, despite the feeling that it might have actually passed the

House had it come to a vote. It's interesting, you talk about the three groups within the Democratic Party. I guess there's at least maybe two groups within the Republican Party, and we're not quite sure where the center of gravity is there. Is it the Tom Cottons, who we heard saying, you know, are you going to shut down the government for illegal immigrants? Tom Cotton is a hardliner on immigration, has put forward a bill that would cut in half the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country each year, would shift from the family-oriented immigration system to the more high-skills-oriented immigration system. I don't know that Tom Cotton actually speaks for the Republican Party.

And I don't know that Lindsey Graham, who's much more moderate, speaks for them either. I think we're still kind of waiting to see where is the center in the Republican Party. On a side argument that was a big deal yesterday. Because the one side is that Donald Trump won the primary in part by taking a hard line on immigration. And that's certainly there's some merit to that. There's also a faction within the GOP that recognizes that long term demographically in this country, they could really marginalize their party if they don't adopt a more a more moderate tone on immigration. And then you've got the country club Republicans or the Chamber of Commerce Republicans. I believe we call them the establishment.

Who believe that a fairly liberal immigration policy is absolutely essential to growing the economy in the U.S. All right. We're going to take a quick break here. We will be right back with more. How much would you pay to avoid morning traffic? Why are plane tickets to Boise so expensive? I'm Cardiff Garcia, co-host of The Indicator. In every episode, we take on a new, unexpected idea to help you make sense of the day's news. Listen every afternoon on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever get to Friday, look back on the week, and say to yourself, what just happened? I'm Sam Sanders. Check out my podcast. It's

been a minute where every Friday we catch up on the news and the culture of the week and try to make sense of it all. Listen on the NPR one app or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back and let's pick up where we left off there on this divide within the Republican Party, because it came to a head this weekend. Lindsey Graham, of course, is one of the key Republican senators trying to hash out a bipartisan deal here. He's someone who wants DACA protectees to say he's someone who wants to lay out a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally. And he expressed some frustration, to put it mildly, with top Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who has basically

the opposite views on all of those points. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere. He's been an outlier for years. And the White House cheekily responded, saying that Lindsey Graham was the outlier. But Scott and Kelsey, as both of you were saying, the mood within the Republican Party is shifting hard between the two of them. And it's hard to pinpoint where exactly it is at this point. And I think in the House, you could argue it's probably closer to Miller, right, within just the Republican caucus. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the thing that I think is interesting that happened a little bit after that, I was standing in that scrum with Graham yesterday. Wait, is this when he was wearing like a hat and he looked like he was wearing a Clemson hat?

He also looked as tired as we all did. But he later said that he was making the differentiation between Tuesday Trump and Thursday Trump. Remember that meeting, the one where he was on camera and he said, I'll sign anything. And then Thursday was the one that was, we'll say, profanity laden. Graham made a really strong distinction between those two versions of Trump. And he blamed not just Miller, but White House staff in general for making Trump shift from one position where he thinks he's naturally, Graham thinks Trump naturally wants to make deals to a hardline position that, in all honesty, probably further aligns with the campaign rhetoric that we

heard out of Trump. But aside from General Kelly, who Graham praised without question, he said that he really worries that that makes it very hard to cut any kind of agreement, cut any deals, and move forward. And White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders pushed back this morning on the notion that somehow Stephen Miller is pulling the president to one side. She said Stephen Miller, like everyone who works at the White House, is there to channel the policies of President Trump. Right. I think what we could say, though, is that Donald Trump has articulated different policies at different times. And Stephen Miller channels one side of those policies.

And Chief of Staff John Kelly probably channels some of that same side. And then you've got Lindsey Graham on the president's opposite shoulder whispering in his ear and saying, hey, why don't you come over here? But again, this is not something that we're just relying on on secondhand reports and anonymous sources from White House meetings, right? Like President Trump was conducting a meeting for an hour on live television where he said repeatedly he wanted to strike a deal. And as this issue first came up back in September, we all played the montages of Trump saying wildly different things at different moments about, you know, why can't American kids dream? Why don't we put Americans first? And of course, the entire presidential campaign with build the wall chants, and then I want a bill of love. I want to show the dreamers love. We need to protect the dreamers. And Stephen Miller, on the other hand, has been remarkably consistent

all the way throughout his history. He was before coming to the White House, was a staffer for then Senator Jeff Sessions. And part of his history there, he and Sessions helped to defeat that bipartisan Senate bill on immigration. They helped to prevent it from coming to a vote in the House. Stephen Miller's the fellow who wrote the president's speech that he delivered in Poland about Western Europe and the Western tradition and defending Western civilization. He is very much a hardliner when it comes to immigration. And as we talk, we have a new statement that just came in from President Trump that nicely fits right into the conversation we're currently having. So this is a statement from the White House press office from President Trump.

I am pleased that Democrats in Congress have come to their senses and are now willing to fund our great military, border patrol, first responders and insurance for vulnerable children. As I've always said, once the government is funded, my administration will work toward solving the problem of very unfair illegal immigration. We will make a long-term deal on immigration if and only if it's good for our country. But actually, he doesn't say anything in there

about protecting the dreamers. Very unfair illegal immigration. That's sort of his end-chain migration, do away with diversity lottery, which are, you know, there may be a consensus in the Congress that those are the directions we should take the immigration system in this country. But I'm not necessarily sure that, you know, chain migration, as the president calls it pejoratively,

is a decision that we made as a country to move to in the mid-1960s. And there are a lot of folks who I think support the idea of reuniting families that way. The diversity lottery probably doesn't have that much of a constituency because it is, after all, a lottery. So, Kelsey, one last thing I want to ask you. You were on Capitol Hill for the 2013 government shutdown, right?

Yes, yes. I was nowhere near Capitol Hill in 2013. I was doing stories on closed national parks in California, which was more scenic than this time around for me. But from your perspective, having been on the Hill for both of these, what were the obviously the length was different. That one went 16 days. What were the other big differences that stand out to you? Well, one is that it's the messaging was clear on both sides in 2013. The goalposts kept shifting in such a short period of time here.

Another difference is that in 2013, it felt more intentional. And Senator Ted Cruz made an intentional decision that the government was going to shut down because of his issues with the Affordable Care Act. This time, it really felt like Democrats didn't want to shut down, but wound up with one because they backed themselves into a corner. And that kind of changes the dynamic across the board. And there was a distinct feeling that people wanted to get out of this as quickly as possible so that it would be forgotten, hopefully, and people could move on. All right. Last question for both of you. What do you think the odds are that we do this all over again, February 9th? Oh, don't make me think about that. Well, we can all sleep on it a little bit and then maybe we can address that on Thursday.

I do think Democrats will be very cautious about walking this plank a second time. If it comes to that, it obviously means they didn't get much out of the first time. And I think once you've shown the cracks in your facade the way they have today, it's going to be very difficult to try to muster that that the votes you need to do it again. All right. Well, I don't know about you guys, but I am more tired Monday afternoon than I was in the middle of the night Saturday. So I think I think it's time to end the show for today. We will be back in your feed soon. Maybe Thursday. Who knows? Maybe sooner. To quote the president, we'll see what happens. If you like the podcast, we'd love if you'd consider subscribing and rating us on iTunes. That really does help people find our pod. And If you like the podcast, we'd love if you'd consider subscribing and rating us on iTunes.

That really does help people find our pod. And if you're near Cleveland, you can come see us live. We're doing a show at the Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square on February 23rd. We just had a great live show in D.C. and we're looking forward to doing it again in Cleveland. You can learn more and get tickets at NPR Presents dot org. That's NPR Presents. All one word,.org. I'm Scott Detrow.

I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021