WASHINGTON �� After two wild days in Washington _ even by Donald Trump's norm-busting standards _ nine Cabinet-level departments and several other federal agencies will stop operations Saturday morning in the latest government shutdown of his presidency.
The White House sent several senior officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, to the Capitol for talks with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis. Schumer laid out three options he said Senate Democrats could support as the group moved from office to office inside the ornate building.
But, in the end, the various factions were unable to settle on one plan that could pass both the House and Senate and get Trump's signature to avert a shutdown or end a very short lapse in funding.
"I hope Senate Democrats will work with the White House on an agreement that can pass both Houses of Congress and receive the president's signature," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Friday evening. "So, colleagues, when an agreement is reached it will receive a vote here on the Senate floor."
The House adjourned shortly after 7 p.m., signaling that neither chamber would have anything to vote on Friday night.
Schumer told Pence, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and senior White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that Senate Democrats would accept the "clean" stopgap senators approved this week; six department-specific spending bills and a yearlong stopgap for the Department of Homeland Security; or all seven remaining spending bills _ if the Homeland Security measure contained $1.6 billion for "pedestrian fencing" in the Rio Grande Valley that the Senate approved this year.
"If the president actually wants to negotiate and avoid a shutdown he should be negotiating with both Democratic and Republican leadership," Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Friday morning. "The president is trying to cast this as Democrats don't care about border security, I do. That's not true. This is about the visuals of him pounding his chest over this," Coons said.
"We're not voting on anything else ... until there's a global agreement," Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said on the floor Friday night. "No test votes."
Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who like Corker is retiring, spoke next and said: "The next time we vote will be on the agreement, not another test vote." But it was unclear Friday night when that might happen.
Federal agencies always have some breathing room when shutdowns loom. And the president gave federal workers another reprieve earlier this week when he gave all federal workers Christmas Eve off.
That means "real impact won't be felt until next Wednesday, so maybe there is a very short term until next Wednesday night," said G. William Hoagland, a former aide to the former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and now an executive at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "The words 'border security' seem to be in play. That's where a final deal will be reached and both sides can claim some credit," Hoagland said.
Marc Short, Trump's former top liaison to Congress, said Friday morning in a television interview that those kinds of matters should have been worked out weeks ago. But Vice President Mike Pence told Republican senators this week that Trump would sign the Senate's stopgap bill with the $1.6 billion for the fencing. That's why many Republican senators headed home after the chamber finished its pre-holiday business.
A few days later, Trump was on Twitter predicting a likely government shutdown "will last for a very long time."
Hoagland went through the last Christmas holiday shutdown in 1995. "It lasted until Jan. 6 _ seems like history is repeating," he said.
Trump has made a series of abrupt decisions since Wednesday morning after conservative opinion-shapers criticized his willingness to sign the Senate's stopgap and his support for a criminal justice reform measure with lighter sentencing policies. He decided to remove all U.S. troops from Syria and about half of the remaining 15,000 in Afghanistan.
The latter two decisions caused his defense secretary, James Mattis, to resign, effective in February. That alarmed some Republican lawmakers, with some of their Democratic colleagues warning of a national security crisis since the retired Marine Corps general was seen as a beacon of stability next to the unpredictable commander in chief.
Shortly before 6 p.m., Trump posted on Twitter an artist's rendering of his envisioned border barrier.
It included a number of what he again called "steel slats." He also described it as "totally effective while at the same time beautiful!"
A spokesman for Schumer spokesman said a final bill could call for "pedestrian fencing" dollars _ but not wall funding.
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(Jennifer Shutt and Niels Lesniewski contributed to this report.(
