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Story highlights The Senate needed 60 votes to pass a resolution to fund the government
Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell said they had an 'arrangement'
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump signed a bill Monday night ending the government shutdown, capping off a nearly three-day deadlock and reinstating funds until February 8, a senior administration official said.
The House and the Senate voted Monday to end the government shutdown, extending funding for three weeks, following a deal being reached between Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell regarding assurances related to immigration.
The House passed the continuing resolution 266-159, with 36 more yes votes than the four-week resolution they passed last week.
The movement comes thanks in part to commitments from McConnell and other Republicans in bipartisan meetings, according to four Democratic sources.
The votes came several hours after the workday for hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees was supposed to have begun, and it comes three days after the government officially shut down Friday at midnight.
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The US government shutdown was, of course, massive international news — it’s essentially the world’s most powerful country and its largest economy going haywire. How does this chaos look through international eyes?
To find out, I spent the morning reading press coverage from a number of countries — from neighbors like Canada and Mexico to European allies to state-run media in Russia and China. What I found was a remarkable convergence on a single theme: The shutdown happened because there is something deeply wrong with the American political system.
“Canadians like to think their system of governance is better than the American one. If they want more evidence, they need only look at what’s happening now — a government shutdown in Washington — and be thankful their system doesn’t allow the same shenanigans,” writes Lawrence Martin, a columnist for Canada’s right-leaning Globe and Mail newspaper.
Reporters in democratic nations like Britain and France are stunned; authoritarian propagandists are downright giddy that America’s political system could collapse into chaos so easily.
Some of the blame seems to be apportioned to President Trump and the Republican Party in general, and some to the basic design of the American political system. But overall, there is a sense that the shutdown has exposed something very wrong about the United States.
“The president’s own people are in a state of rolling confusion”
A lot of the international press was interested in the nuts and bolts of the shutdown, especially as it affected their citizens’ travel plans. “The US Embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin has clarified that offices there are open as scheduled despite the US government shutdown,” Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE clarified.
But the world, like many Americans, was also interested in playing the blame game: Who is responsible for this, and why?
Trump came in for a lot of the blame, personally. “No president until now has suffered a ‘shutdown’ when their party controls both houses of Congress. Trump is the first,” El Universal, Mexico’s largest paper, helpfully explained.
Ed Luce, an op-ed writer for Britain’s Financial Times, blamed the failure on the president’s policy ignorance and general incompetence.
“Mr. Trump vowed he would be a dealmaker — that was his main selling point. Yet he has a habit of wriggling out of any oral deal he has struck,” Luce writes. “In addition to being unable to uphold a deal with Democrats, Mr Trump disagrees with crucial White House officials. The president’s own people are in a state of rolling confusion about what he wants.”
Others looked beyond Trump personally, instead seeing the fact that both sides are willing to shut down the government as evidence of something gone wrong in the United States. You saw that narrative both in Martin’s Globe and Mail Column and a dispatch from Pierre-Yves Dugua, the Washington correspondent for France’s Le Figaro.
“If the shutdown is suspended today, the Democrats will have showed, during the weekend of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s entry into the White House, that Republicans who control both chambers of Congress aren’t capable of doing the first task of a government: to vote to fund the essential functions of the state,” Dugua writes.
This broader narrative — that America’s political system is fundamentally broken — was the dominant theme in authoritarian countries as well. China’s state-run Xinhua News Service, which takes basically every opportunity it can get to criticize American democracy as weak and defective, blamed the shutdown on “chronic flaws” in the American political system.
“The Western democratic system is hailed by the developed world as near perfect and the most superior political system to run a country,” Xinhua’s Liu Chang writes, with practically palpable irony.
Chang is wrong to indict the entirety of Western democracy — he is a propagandist, after all — but not entirely wrong when it comes to the American system. In most parliamentary systems, government shutdowns are not possible: There’s nothing like a filibuster that allows a minority party to block essential legislation. If there aren’t the votes to pass a budget, new elections are held within months while current government funding levels are maintained. After new elections, the new government can almost always pass a budget.
Hence the level of shock not just from Chinese state-run media, which has an incentive to make America look bad, but from reporters for outlets in democracies. This level of dysfunction literally should not be possible; it is incomprehensible to many of their readers that government could function this poorly.
Of course, not every foreign look at the shutdown was so on point. RT, Russia’s English-language propaganda outlet, interviewed a contributor to the right-wing conspiracy theory site Infowars named Patrick Henningsen.
Henningsen argued that the whole shutdown crisis is a media-driven distraction from what he sees as the true scandal, which is Democrats lying about Trump’s ties to Russia. He also insisted that the shutdown proved it was time to shut down the US government for good.
“The US is bankrupt as a country,” Henningsen said. “They should be in receivership right now.”
After a three-day standoff, Congress has voted to reopen the government — but only for three weeks.
In a last-minute decision, Senate Democrats agreed to pass a spending bill that would fund the federal government through February 8, and fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program for six years, with an assurance from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to negotiate some kind of immigration deal within that time period and put a bill on the floor for a vote.
The House passed the same spending bill a few hours later.
Lawmakers were stuck in an impasse for three days after the Senate failed to pass a spending bill Friday night, shutting down the government. Democrats and several Republicans handily voted down a House bill that would have extended the shutdown deadline to February 16. Since then, Democrats had been trying to extract firm assurances from Republican leaders, in hopes a bipartisan immigration bill will land on President Trump’s desk.
Lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with the state of immigration negotiations in recent months. Republicans have punted on finding a legislative fix for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program since September, when the Trump administration announced it would end the program by March 5. They’ve also kicked down more permanent budget negotiations, instead passing three short-term spending deals since October 1 — the latest extends current spending levels for another three weeks.
At this point, it’s not clear a couple weeks of immigration negotiations can resolve what has become an anarchic congressional debate over immigration. On Friday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has been leading some bipartisan immigration negotiations in the Senate, said they were “inside the 10-yard line,” but Trump’s role in the debate is still up in the air. Trump spun negotiations into chaos last week after reportedly calling some countries “shitholes” in a closed-door meeting with lawmakers, and continues to engage immigration hardliners who seem unwilling to compromise with Democrats.
There’s still a chance it could all go haywire in the days ahead. For the time being, lawmakers have reopened the government and have a lot of work to do.
Now they have to actually “finish up” immigration and spending talks
Congress has only bought itself a little more time. The idea is that they will cobble together a deal on immigration and more permanent government spending in the weeks ahead.
But that won’t be easy. So far, Trump has been presented with one bipartisan proposal on immigration and shot it down.
The agreement — reached by a bipartisan group of six senators led by Graham, fellow Republican Jeff Flake (AZ), and Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) — would give DACA beneficiaries (known as DREAMers) a chance at legal status and a path to citizenship while restricting them from sponsoring their parents, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and funding some border projects. The agreement was panned by congressional conservatives like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who increasingly have had the president’s ear on the issue.
Meadows told reporters Friday that Trump has assured Cotton and him that the White House would not support any immigration bill that does not have their approval, which could throw a wrench into DACA negotiations.
The shutdown also brought together a larger group of bipartisan negotiators — roughly 30 senators who have called themselves the “Common Sense Coalition,” who are intent on moving immigration talks forward.
There’s only one immigration working group with White House involvement — a team of Democratic and Republican leadership deputies that have been dubbed the “No. 2s,” consisting of Durbin again, as well as Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
This group ramped up negotiations in recent days but have yet to come forward with a proposal. Durbin said the No. 2s only recently started actually discussing the specifics of an immigration proposal in the past few days.
Democrats’ concerns that Trump’s conditions will only push immigration talks to the right are not unmerited. In order to win enough House Republican votes for the short-term spending bill, House Speaker Paul Ryan promised the Freedom Caucus, the lower chamber’s ultraconservatives, that Republican leadership would whip votes for a conservative immigration bill, likely similar to one put forward by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). That partisan proposal is unlikely to garner any Democratic support.
Conservatives continue to say there is a path to compromise, but they have shown no willingness to work with Democrats. Meanwhile, Congress remains in the dark over what Trump actually wants from an immigration deal.
Congress still has to actually figure out government spending
On top of immigration, Congress still has to strike a permanent spending deal for 2018.
So far, the parties still haven’t agreed on new budget caps, which put a hard upper limit on spending for defense and domestic programs. Without budget caps, any massive spending bill risks triggering a sequester — across-the-board cuts to domestic and military spending.
Republicans need Democratic votes to raise the budget caps on military spending and domestic programs.
It all goes back to 2011, when an Obama-era impasse over the debt ceiling brought the American economy to near calamity. The ultimate result was the 2013 sequester, which set into law across-the-board budget cuts and established caps that would amount to $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years.
Since the sequester, there have been two bipartisan deals to raise the caps by billions of dollars. The first in 2013 was forged between Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray; a second was agreed on in 2015. There’s no question that Trump wants Congress to do that again.
Last year, Trump’s budget called for $603 billion in defense funding, and both the Senate and House separately proposed even higher figures.
Congress has repeatedly voted to raise the budget caps and give sequester relief, but those adjustments, which extended through fiscal year 2017, have now expired. In 2018, the sequester budget caps max out defense spending at $549 billion and non-defense discretionary funding at $516 billion, far less than what both Republicans and Democrats would like to spend.
Democrats have established a guiding principle in spending cap negotiations: If Republicans want more funding for defense, then Democrats want a one-for-one increase in non-defense funding. This time, however, that agreement hit a snag.
Appropriators need these topline numbers to begin putting together a trillion-dollar spending bill that would fund the government through next September. Reaching a budget cap deal is a high priority for defense hawks in Congress, who say short-term spending deals hobble the military — preventing them from being able to adequately plan resources.
