Government shutdowns usually need a pressure point to force a compromise that brings them to their end.
There’s no sign of any such pressure point in the current shutdown, which has left the Department of Homeland Security shuttered.
Unlike the six-week shutdown in the fall, when every agency lacked funding authority, more than 95 percent of agencies now have their full-year budgets. National parks are open with full services, passports are being processed without shutdown-related delays, and the troops are under no threat of losing their pay.
ICE and Border Patrol agents, who work under the DHS umbrella, also have no need to fear missed paychecks, because the massive domestic policy bill President Donald Trump signed in July surged money into those immigration enforcement agencies.
Plenty of other agencies, ranging from FEMA to the Federal Aviation Administration to the Secret Service, are twisting in the wind, however. And Transportation Security Administration workers will miss their first checks in the next few days.
But there’s little indication the American public is at all concerned with the state of affairs: Lawmakers who returned to the Capitol on Tuesday, after a more than 10-day stint at home, said that the DHS shutdown was not registering as a top concern with constituents.
Several Democrats said if the DHS funding came up, it was in relation to constituents’ concerns about the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who engaged in violent and deadly clashes this winter in Minneapolis.
“The bulk of them have been about concern for ICE, about ICE killing people, about the brutality that we are seeing ICE do,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-New Mexico).
It is Democrats who hold the key to ending the shutdown; the Republican controlled Senate needs Democratic votes to fund DHS. But after two Americans were killed by DHS agents in Minneapolis, Democrats have demanded several reforms in exchange for their help.
Democrats want new accountability measures, including forbidding ICE agents from wearing masks and needing proper warrants in carrying out their raids to be codified into law. Republicans have generally opposed those asks, while countering with their own demands that local governments no longer serve as “sanctuary cities” and coordinate their activities with ICE.
Facing a Feb. 14 funding deadline, both the House and Senate adjourned more than a day early for the annual Presidents’ Day recess, providing a week-and-a-half window for lawmakers to travel abroad to security conferences and spend time with constituents at home.
The House returned to session Tuesday afternoon, then adjourned again Wednesday morning so that Democrats could trek 50 miles west of the Capitol for their annual policy retreat. Republicans will leave in a couple weeks for their own retreat at a Florida resort.
The Senate, as is its modern custom, left session just after lunchtime Thursday.
No serious negotiations have been held yet to broker a deal. Democrats have suggested they are in no hurry to come to the negotiating table, and, if anything, are being encouraged to hold out longer.
Most congressional offices produce weekly reports on issues their constituents express concern about through calls, emails and texts. It’s an imperfect model but it lets lawmakers know what has constituents so concerned that they will pick up a phone or tap out an email.
According to an estimate from the office of Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey), his aides fielded more than 4,000 contacts from constituents from Feb. 9 through Feb. 20, which was the week building up to the DHS shutdown and the week immediately after funding lapsed.
More than a third of those calls were related to opposing Trump on immigration issues or opposed to funding DHS until constraints had been placed on ICE. Only a tiny fraction called to push for reopening DHS.
A senior aide to another Senate Democrat, requesting anonymity to discuss the office’s private data, said that callers, by about an 8-to-1 margin, urged the senator to stand up to Trump on ICE matters rather than pushing to quickly reopen the Homeland Security agencies.
Democrats say their constituents have been lighting up their phones and email inboxes like this ever since the strict enforcement actions started last spring.
“We received more calls in our office regarding ICE than any other subject over the last year,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) said. “And the intensity was tremendous as the inhumanity stuck out to people, the cruelty. And so that was the number one issue.”
It’s not just Democrats; Republicans say they heard no concerns from their constituents about the shutdown during the recess.
“Number one, after being home for a week, it was mail service, three to one, over everything else combined,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota).
“Nobody even brought it up to me. I don’t think there’s a bite to it yet. Which does not make it a good sign,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said.
Hawley corrected himself to note that, over more than 10 days around Missouri, two people did bring up the shutdown: TSA agents in St. Louis’s airport.
“Hey, you know, we’re really worried about this, we have families, we’re worried about not getting paid,” one agent told the senator, who said he replied, “Yeah, this is terrible, this is a travesty.”
In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Trump tried to turn up the political heat, briefly blaming Democrats, almost an hour into his marathon speech, for shutting down the department.
“They have closed the agency responsible for protecting Americans from terrorists and murderers. Tonight, I’m demanding the full and immediate restoration of all funding for the border security, homeland security,” Trump said, before pivoting more broadly into accusations that Democrats do not want to protect Americans from violent undocumented migrants.
It will take more time to see if Trump’s talk will prompt action. So far, without any pressure, Congress has taken a slow-walking approach to this issue.
Many Democrats think it’s time for Republicans to cave to end the DHS shutdown, especially now that polls have shown that immigration — a policy area that Trump has previously used to his advantage — is becoming a clear political weakness for Republicans.
“[Trump’s] numbers are in the tank and Republicans need to recognize that,” Leger Fernandez said. “What you need to have is, rather than having a handful of Democrats in the Senate say the pain is too much, you have those handful of Republicans in the Senate and in the House say the pain is too much.”
Having a polling advantage might not be enough for Democrats, however. During last fall’s shutdown, polls consistently showed voters blamed Trump and congressional GOP majorities more than Democrats, who were fighting to extend health care tax subsidies.
Despite winning the political side of the battle, eight Senate Democrats grew concerned about food stamp benefits that Trump threatened to cut off and airline safety because of the high callout rates from TSA and FAA workers. They voted to advance a simple funding bill that gave time for Congress to pass a large package that originally funded every agency.
A similar situation could play out this time, especially after Hawley said Republicans are not going to give in. He wants Democrats to find “another way to prosecute” the ICE showdown.
In the current environment, he said, the only thing likely to force a deal is growing protests from unpaid federal workers and so many “sick” airport workers that it becomes dangerous to fly.
“I don’t want to get to that,” Hawley said, “and I don’t wanna get to the point where we have mass chaos in airports.”
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