WASHINGTON _ As GOP leaders scrambled Thursday for votes to avert a federal shutdown, President Donald Trump undermined the effort with a morning tweet opposing part of the deal.
Passage of the four-week stopgap measure remains uncertain. Conservative Republicans and defense hawks object to yet another temporary measure and want more stable funding.
Democrats are rejecting the package without an immigration deal to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.
Trump threw voting into further jeopardy Thursday morning when he tweeted against including a six-year extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program, which Republican leaders had attached to help attract support, particularly from Democrats who pushed for the program.
Trump said funding for the program should be part of "a long-term solution," not the stopgap measure. Some speculated that perhaps the president was not aware that the CHIP funding would be extended for six years, rather than the four weeks of the spending bill.
The White House has endorsed the stopgap measure, including the funding for the children's program.
By lunchtime, the administration tried to clarify the confusion, insisting that the president supports the current measure in the House.
That was only after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., spoke to the president by phone and the GOP whip, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, tweeted a rebuttal.
"I've spoken with the president," Ryan told reporters, confident he had enough House votes for passage. "He does understand."
The president similarly undermined a House vote last week reauthorizing a federal surveillance program until Ryan intervened and Trump reversed course.
In remarks at the Pentagon on Thursday, Trump seemed resigned to a federal shutdown.
"It could happen," he said. "We'll see what happens. It's up to the Democrats."
Republicans, who were blamed for government shutdowns in 1995 and 2013, are hoping to shift blame onto Democrats.
But the GOP, with control of Congress and the White House, may be seen by voters as responsible.
"This is one of the only times ever there's been a shutdown when one party controlled the House, the Senate, the White House," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She called the GOP spending bill a "bowl of doggy doo."
"It's really almost like an amateur hour," she said, noting that Trump tweeted about the benefits of a shutdown last year. "Republicans are dillydallying, taking their good old time; maybe they just don't believe in governance."
Trump told Pelosi personally this week at the Capitol that he wanted a fix for the Dreamers, the young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. She urged Republicans to negotiate. Talks continued Thursday behind closed doors.
"The president said he wants to help DACA," she said about the immigrants who have received deportation protections under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump announced last fall he was ending the program, which will terminate unless Congress acts.
In the Senate, prospects for passage of the temporary funding bill dimmed as leading Democrats _ including those who supported the last stopgap measure _ now withheld support without a resolution for Dreamers.
The top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, said he would now vote against the bill, as did the Virginia Democrats, Sen. Tim Kaine and Sen. Mark R. Warner, who represent large numbers of federal employees, and the New Mexico Democrats, Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, who represent large numbers of immigrants and their advocates.
Senate Democrats are under great pressure from Dreamers to use their leverage to stop the bill and get an immigration deal that would protect the young people from deportation.
Republicans, with their slim 51-seat majority in the Senate, will likely need about a dozen Democrats to help pass the bill if some of their own GOP senators object as expected.
