US shutdown drags after no deal done

China Daily | Updated: 2018-01-23 07:38

Lawmakers to vote on bringing temporary end to impasse

WASHINGTON - A US government shutdown will enter its third day on Monday as Senate negotiators failed to reach agreement late on Sunday to restore federal spending authority and deal with demands from Democrats that young "Dreamers" be protected from deportation.

The Senate set a vote for 12 pm on Monday on advancing a measure to provide temporary government funding through Feb 8, end the shutdown and allow hundreds of thousands of federal employees to return to work.

At the core of Democrats' demands is the fate of young people, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children. Former Democratic President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program extended legal protections to about 700,000 of them, shielding them from being deported.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered an olive branch to Democrats late on Sunday, pledging on the Senate floor to bring immigration legislation up for debate in February if the issue is still unresolved by then.

If the government is open, "it would be my intention to proceed to legislation that would address DACA, border security, and related issues," McConnell said on the Senate floor.

"Importantly, when I proceed to the immigration debate, it will have an amendment process that is fair to all sides."

But Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said that "we have yet to reach an agreement" on reopening the government and immigration. It remains unclear whether the three-week stopgap spending bill has enough votes to pass the Senate.

The effects of the government shutdown will be more visible on Monday, when federal agencies and financial markets open, and thousands of nonessential federal employees are expected to be furloughed.

The last government shutdown, in October 2013, lasted for 16 days and about 850,000 federal employees were furloughed.

The current government funding expired on Friday midnight as the Senate failed to advance a stopgap spending bill, which had passed the House of Representatives and would fund the government through Feb 16.

Democrats had hoped that they could use the government spending as leverage to pass an immigration bill, while Republicans and the Trump administration insisted that they would not negotiate on immigration until Democrats give them enough votes to reopen the government.

"The president's position is clear: we will not negotiate on the status of unlawful immigrants while Sen. Schumer and the Democrats hold the government for millions of Americans and our troops hostage," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday in a statement.

Republican Senator Jeff Flake, part of a bipartisan working group pushing for legislation to replace DACA, told reporters that McConnell was still six or seven Democratic votes short of breaking the impasse that led to the shutdown.

Flake said negotiations would resume early on Monday leading up to the midday vote on the Senate floor.

While public reaction to the shutdown may have been muted over the weekend, Flake said Republicans would suffer politically in the long run. "If it comes back to bite, it comes back to bite pretty hard," the Arizona senator said.

The White House said Trump's planned trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week was in flux because of the standoff on Capitol Hill.

Reuters - Xinhua