An effort by Republicans to keep the government open for one month was rejected in a vote on Friday night after they failed to address Democratic concerns about young undocumented migrants known as Dreamers.
Republicans needed 60 votes to pass the bill. Five red-state Democrats supported it while four Republicans voted against and 12am ET came and went without a deal, causing funding for the federal government to lapse.
Federal law requires agencies to shut down if Congress has not appropriated money to fund them. Hundreds of thousands of “non-essential” federal employees will be put on temporary unpaid leave. In previous shutdowns, services deemed “essential”, such as the work of the homeland security and the FBI, have continued.
On Saturday morning, Donald Trump greeted the news with a typical flurry of tweets. “This is the One Year Anniversary of my Presidency,” he wrote, “and the Democrats wanted to give me a nice present. #DemocratShutdown.”
Speaking on the floor after the vote, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell also assailed the opposition party, saying the shutdown was the result of a “cynical decision by the Democrats”. Minority leader Chuck Schumer delivered a scathing rebuke of Trump. The New Yorker said the president “walked away from two bipartisan deals” and that “a Trump shutdown will serve as a perfect encapsulation for the chaos he has unleashed”.
A White House statement issued just before midnight said “this is the behavior of obstructionist losers, not legislators”.
Democrats blamed Republican divisions. Oregon senator Ron Wyden said lawmakers from his rival party were not on the same page as Trump.
“You’ve got the three branches of government – everything,” Wyden said. “Can these folks organize a two-car parade?”
On Thursday, the House voted by a margin of 230-197 to advance the bill after speaker Paul Ryan made concessions to conservatives in the Freedom Caucus. These included a vote on increased military funding, a potential vote on a hardline immigration bill and other “subplots” which Mark Meadows, head of the Freedom Caucus, declined to share with reporters. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with only six Democrats and 11 Republicans breaking ranks.
The bill did not contain any provisions to protect Dreamers, which has been a key Democratic priority since Trump announced in September that he was rescinding an Obama-era program, known as Daca, that enabled undocumented migrants brought to the US as children to obtain temporary legal status.
Ryan preemptively tried to blame Democrats for any government shutdown, telling reporters: “The only people standing in the way of keeping the government open are Senate Democrats.”
In a final dash to avert a shutdown, Trump cancelled plans to depart for his Mar-a-lago resort in Florida, where he was due to celebrate the anniversary of his first year in office. Instead, Trump spent the day negotiating with congressional leaders.
The president hosted Schumer in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, the two New Yorkers talking over cheeseburgers in a small dining room adjacent to the Oval Office.
A source briefed on the meeting said Schumer offered not only to meet Trump’s full funding request for a border wall but also agreed to boosting defense spending “far above” what the White House requested.
In exchange, Schumer requested a short-term measure that would keep the government open for a few days, in the hopes of reaching a broader compromise. The president seemed amenable to Schumer’s approach, the source said, and told the Democratic leader he would broach the topic with Republicans.
But not long after Schumer returned to the Capitol, he received a phone call from John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Kelly, a hardliner on immigration, informed Schumer the deal discussed with Trump was too liberal.
As lawmakers scrambled, progressive activists and Dreamers held a rally against the illuminated backdrop of the Capitol. They implored lawmakers to reject any funding measure that did not include a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 700,000 Dreamers whose protections will expire in March.
“For all those Dreamers out there, our message for each and every one of you: there are those in our government that see you, that hear you, that believe and know that this country belongs to you,” said Joe Kennedy III, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, repeating the message in Spanish.
Funding for the government was initially due to expire in September, but lawmakers have passed a series of stopgap measures.
The last short-term extension, which was passed in December, pushed the deadline to 19 January while leaving the fate of Dreamers in limbo. Democrats faced backlash from immigration advocates and their base for failing to hold the line on Daca, having vowed not to adjourn for the new year without a solution.
Trump gave Congress until 5 March to replace the program. But Democrats have insisted the only way to resolve the deep partisan divide over immigration is by tying it to a must-pass bill that would simultaneously avert a shutdown and enshrine protections for Dreamers into law.
Trump showed a brief willingness to compromise last week by engaging lawmakers from both parties on a potential deal to legalize Dreamers in return for beefing up border security and changes to some visa programs. But the president dramatically undermined such talks by questioning the need to admit immigrants from places such as Haiti and El Salvador, dismissing them “shithole countries” in a private meeting with lawmakers.
Republicans chose to move ahead with a short-term bill to fund the government, arguing that immigration was a separate issue. To pressure Democrats, they included in their measure a six-year authorization of a popular health insurance program (Chip), which provides healthcare coverage to 9 million children.
