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Congress Votes to Avoid Shutdown
00:07:50
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unidentified
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7 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| Joining us now to set the stage on what we can expect today from Congress is Siobhan Hughes, Wall Street Journal Congressional Reporter. | ||
| Siobhan, thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good to be here. | |
| All right. | ||
| So some movement overnight, but of course that very big vote happening on that six-bill package that would fund several departments right now, including DHS, to avoid a partial shutdown that's happening today. | ||
| Lay out what folks can expect to see from Congress. | ||
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unidentified
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So that's an 1130 vote. | |
| This is, as the article puts it, a test vote, a procedural vote. | ||
| You would need 60 votes in order to move on to the next step and actually get onto the bill. | ||
| It's possible that you will see this vote collapse. | ||
| You not get the 60 votes, but that should not be a sign of alarm. | ||
| The Senate can always kind of come back and through some Senate magic, a unanimous consent agreement, especially reach their deal and put that on the floor. | ||
| But a lot of the terms are not there yet. | ||
| And there are kind of two big things I would point out here. | ||
| Number one, the most important word in that story was President Trump. | ||
| It does seem like President Trump is involved here and he is going to be key. | ||
| And that relates to the next point, which this still has to get through the House. | ||
| So the bottom line is this is an encouraging sign for avoiding a shutdown, but the country and the Congress are not quite there yet. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was some talk about, you know, there was not a lot of guidance from the White House on these Democratic demands. | ||
| But I just want to go through these very quickly for our audience here, Siobhan. | ||
| What the Senate Democrats outlined last night as to what they want to see changes. | ||
| That means ending roving patrols for the DHS, tightening the rules on warrants, and require ICE to coordinate with local authorities, enforce accountability and uniform code of conduct, require agents to take their masks offs and wear body cameras and carry ID. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how the Democrats have come to these demands and changes to GHS? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, and so Democrats cast these as a very narrow set of demands. | |
| They are not doing something like calling to abolish ICE or asking to take away the $75 billion that was granted to ICE in the reconciliation bill. | ||
| They're trying to focus on things they think will actually make a difference. | ||
| What they describe is the exact word in that article. | ||
| What they say are roving bands of agents coming to round up people they suspect of being there illegally. | ||
| Some of it is very self-explanatory, the mandatory body cameras, that ICE agents not have masks, that they carry identification, where this gets a little trickier and where the ask is not quite specific yet and the deal is not quite done has to do with the issue of the requirement for warrants. | ||
| There does seem to be some support for requiring warrants to force your way into somebody's home. | ||
| It appears that the federal government has been relying on what they call administrative warrants, which is a concept that their legal officers came up with. | ||
| But then even beyond that, the immigration law dating back to the 1950s does allow for warrantless arrests. | ||
| And that is what Democrats view as a really, really big part of the problem. | ||
| And it's not exactly clear how they would like to change that. | ||
| What are you hearing from Senate Republicans? | ||
| Obviously, Trump is going to loom large in these conversations. | ||
| And I think multiple senators want him to be in charge of making a deal with Democrats. | ||
| But in some ways, Senate Republicans have kind of ignored these Democratic demands. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, what we have been hearing in the hallways from a lot of Republicans is that they too feel that what has happened in Minneapolis has simply gone too far. | |
| And so you see somebody like John Husted from Ohio, who's up for re-election, breaking with the president. | ||
| Tom Tillis of North Carolina, a retiring member, very loudly breaking with the president. | ||
| And so you're seeing the ground really shift under the president's feet and him losing members of his own party on this. | ||
| And that, I think, is what has opened up the possibility for a deal. | ||
| Now, you mentioned, obviously, that the House would have to vote on this if there were changes made, if there was a deal made by the Democrats in the White House. | ||
| Does that feel likely that the House would come back and vote to keep the government open? | ||
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unidentified
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So this is really the big question, Mark. | |
| My reporting shows that when this package made it through the House, the only reason it made it through was because the White House leaned hard on Republicans, particularly that conservative bloc in the House Freedom Caucus, to vote for the Department of Homeland Security bill, which they did not want to do because it already included certain restrictions on immigration authorities, $20 million, for example, for body cameras. | ||
| And they reluctantly went along with the president. | ||
| And so what they would be asked to do essentially is to not only accept a deal they already didn't like, but to swallow even more changes. | ||
| And my reporting is that unless President Trump gets involved and the White House sort of says, no, no, no, you must vote for this again, the country could be in for a little bit of shakiness in terms of a shutdown. | ||
| So let's say that the president doesn't get as involved as people think that he should be, or that he does get involved and yet a deal is not made by the Democrats. | ||
| Is there a plan B happening here? | ||
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unidentified
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I mean, there are always plan Bs in the sense that there are a whole lot of options on the table, but right now this really is the plan B. | |
| The plan B is to fund five of the bills, do a continuing resolution for that sixth containing the Department of Homeland Security to buy some time to work out a deal. | ||
| That really is the backup plan. | ||
| So in your estimation, being on the hill walking those halls, does a government shutdown right now feel inevitable, or is there wiggle room here for both sides to come and stave off? | ||
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unidentified
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I mean, at this point, it does seem like at least a short-term shutdown is inevitable. | |
| The Senate is supposed to be in tomorrow, and it looks like they would really like to try to reach a deal by tomorrow. | ||
| But of course, February 1st is coming this weekend, and it does not seem likely that the House is going to return by then. | ||
| The question really is: are we going to end up in a technical shutdown where it's on a weekend or just a few days, or if it is going to be something of a longer duration? | ||
| I do not see signs we are in for another record shutdown. | ||
| I do not see signs that there are going to be people who miss paychecks. | ||
| There's very little appetite for that. | ||
| But you can't totally rule that out yet. | ||
| Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal, Congressional Reporter, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
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unidentified
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And a live look at the U.S. Capitol as the region continues to dig out from a massive snowstorm. | |
| The Senate today has been working on trying to avoid a partial government shutdown. | ||
| A vote to advance a six-bill funding package to continue operations past Friday night at midnight failed by a vote of 45 to 55. | ||
| 60 votes were needed to move forward. | ||
| At issue is funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes immigration officials and ICE. | ||
| Democrats are insisting that money for the agency be stripped out of the minibus package. | ||
| According to news reports, the White House appears to be open to that idea. | ||
| We'll continue to bring you updates as the government shutdown approaches. | ||
| And you can keep an eye on our government shutdown clock, showing the amount of time Congress has left to act on the bottom right of your screen across the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Today marks 40 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart and exploded 73 seconds after takeoff. | ||