There is no way to determine how long the 2018 government shutdown could last, but Senators are not showing any sign of getting close to a deal in its second day.
Furloughs for thousands of federal workers will start Monday after Republicans and Democrats in the Senate failed to approve a short-term spending bill passed by the House Friday night. The shutdown officially started at midnight ET, Saturday.
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Senators did not take the weekend off, staying in Washington to keep talking. Sen. Bill Nelsion (D-Florida) told reporters he was “optimistic” about the talks, but said there is a “long way to go before we get there,” reports CBS News. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) said they are “so close, it’s ridiculous.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) blamed President Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller, a hard-liner on immigration, for the shutdown.
“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration we are going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years,” Graham said Sunday, reports CBS News. He still predicted there could be a “breakthrough” Sunday night.
Immigration has been a sticking point in the shutdown. Trump’s director of legislative affairs, Marc Short, told ABC’s This Week Sunday that the president wants to see a deal to protect “Dreamers,” the children of immigrants allowed to work and go to school under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). But it was Trump who ended that program, which President Barack Obama expanded through executive action.
“I think you’ve seen the White House show an openness to expand that population, while Democrats have said there are other people who should be part of the DACA population because they were either afraid or didn’t apply to the program,” Short said, reports The Hill. “We’ve shown a willingness to consider that. So we feel like we’re making progress on multiple areas.”
Democrats have also rejected any deal that calls for a short-term funding solution.
“There are people, even five Republicans, who voted against the cloture on the continuing resolution because they’re sick as well of these continuing resolutions,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) told NBC’s Meet The Press. “So you say, ‘Why don’t we wait another three weeks, another four weeks?’ It has to come to end, and it will, if and when the president shows the leadership that we expect of him as president.”
The U.S. government has been shut down 18 times since Congress adopted its current rules on passing budgets and spending bills, as Vox points out.
Most of the shutdowns have not been too long. The longest lasted a month — from Dec. 5, 1996 to Jan. 6, 2996, during the Clinton Administration. The next shutdown wasn’t until October 2013. That shutdown lasted 16 days.
