With day 33 of the partial government shutdown in the books, the Senate has scheduled votes on Thursday in the first attempt of such since federal funding an out at midnight on December 21, 2018. However, funding packages from both parties in power are likely to fail to meet the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to end the impasse, which is under 53-47 Republican control.
Both bills would reopen nine federal agencies and dole out paychecks to 800,000 government employees, but the similarities end there.
Under the Republican plan, $5.7 billion would be allocated to building the U.S.-Mexico border wall (or barrier) in “strategic locations” and, per President Trump‘s remarks, provide for a three-year extension of protections for over 700,000 undocumented immigrants shielded from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump’s funding request also includes $800 million for humanitarian assistance, $805 million for drug detection technology, 2,750 more border agents and law enforcement officers, and 75 more immigration judges.
Democrats, on the other hand, have continued to work on a package that would ignore the president’s demand for $5.7 billion for a southern border wall and would instead allocate funds for other ideas aimed at protecting the border, what they call a “21st Century plan.” Although the Democratic Party’s border security plan and its costs remain a work in progress, it is said to include money for scanning devices and other advanced technological tools to bolster security at certain ports of entry at the southern border, as well as money for additional border agents and immigration judges.
Even if the Senate were to pass either plan, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (CA-12) has already scheduled to send the lower chamber home on Friday, ensuring that the shutdown will continue into next week. Moreover, it will fuel more animus in Republicans that the speaker and her party are not as interested as they say in reopening the government and sending hundreds of thousands of people back to work.
Nevertheless, in the consistent fighting between the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives and the Republican president, the State of the Union address next week has been postponed. Trump yielded to the speaker after a week-long showdown that featured the commander in chief cancelling a trip commissioned by Pelosi and a select group of congressional Democrats to Belgium, Egypt, and Afghanistan, calling the “seven-day excursion” an unnecessary “public relations event.”
White House officials have considered a backup plan to have President Trump give the speech at an alternate location if majority Democrats block the House chamber. Regardless, as the length of the shutdown is now unprecedented, Pelosi could break another bureaucratic paradigm as no invitation for the president’s State of the Union address has ever been rescinded.