US Govt. Shuts Down As Trump Talks Tough

Tweeting on Friday morning, Trump said: “Government Funding Bill past [sic] last night in the House of Representatives”.

However, four Republicans opposed the bill and it failed to reach the 60-vote supermajority needed to avoid a filibuster in the Senate.

Trump and the Republicans argue that by blocking the spending bill, Democrats are siding with illegal immigrants and causing hardship to federal employees, including military personnel, and are denying insurance to children and the poor under a government programme.

The Republican president has vacillated on what sort of legislation he supports and McConnell now seems willing to let the Senate craft a deal on legal protections for Dreamers and beefing up immigration enforcement at US borders. The Democrats just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked.

However, what President Donald Trump said as a private citizen came back to haunt him this weekend as one million government workers and bureaucrats prepared not go into work or get paid Monday because he was unable to forge a deal in Congress to keep the government open.

To discus more on the USA government shutdown and the Women’s March, CGTN’s Susan Robers spoke with Eleanor Clift, a political analyst for the publication The Daily Beast.

The Democrats have demanded protection from deportation of more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants who entered the USA as children.

The New York Democrat said on the Senate floor Sunday that he proposed authorizing funding for President Trump’s wall along the border with Mexico, in exchange for protections for DREAMers, but the offer was rejected.

Hours before the shutdown, Trump had laid the entire blame at the doorstep of Democrats.

But Schumer claimed that the Republican president was not reliable in negotiations. A vote is scheduled for noon Monday that would end the shutdown with a short-term spending bill that would last three weeks.

The government shutdown dragged on through its second day Sunday, and bipartisan efforts to break the impasse appeared to yield only minor progress even as Republicans unified around a path forward.

The promise of a vote on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, although it could be reneged on, is something Democrats didn’t have before.

The shutdown began a year to the day after Trump was sworn in as President. Democrats increasingly focused their messaging on criticizing Trump, whose popularity is dismal.

The last government shutdown took place in 2013 and lasted for just over two weeks. It’s the first time Democrats received a firm deadline for a vote on an immigration bill.

Under Senate rules, the bill needs 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to overcome blocking tactics by opponents.

All of this is more than a bit ironic coming from a guy who said that a shutdown strategy was idiotic in order to push for political wins. He tweeted a call for McConnell to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and thereby remove leverage for Senate Democrats.

He added: “Not only did they not consult us, they can’t get on the same page as their own president”.

This is not the first time that Trump has suggested the “nuclear option”, though the Senate Republican leadership has so far been unwilling to use it.

“They could have easily made a deal but chose to play Shutdown”, tweeted President Donald Trump, hours after the shutdown began at Friday midnight. In return, Senate Republican leaders promised to soon take up immigration and other prickly issues.