The House and Senate have remained in session Saturday, the first day of the Trump Shutdown with absolutely no sign of progress happening anywhere. The Senate will vote Monday on the same spending bill that failed Friday night, but with a slightly shorter duration, to February 8 rather than February 16. Republicans remain adamant that they will not negotiate on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals as long as the government is shut down. Democrats will not let Republicans continue to postpone dealing with DACA and will not bail Republicans out of the shutdown until they have real negotiations. McConnell has made a stab or two at getting unanimous consent to move the vote up from Monday. Democrats have remained on the floor to block him.
At the same time, Democrats have been attempting to defuse the situation and release some hostages. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) offered an amendment to remove CHIP and community health center funding, so it could be done as a stand-alone bill. McConnell objected.
Meanwhile, on the House side, they've debated the rule that would allow them to accept anything the Senate might send over. That's very unlikely to happen any time soon because Republican leadership has been and continues to be essentially AWOL, more intent on trying to shift blame for this to Democrats than in making government work. I know, you're shocked.
After a House Democratic Caucus meeting Saturday, Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) summed it up. He's very "pessimistic about reopening the government in any kind of expeditious way […] because of the intransigence of Republican leadership," he said.
That starts with the White House, where Trump and his lackeys have proved not just uncooperative but counterproductive.
"Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O," Schumer said after negotiations broke down on Friday after a meeting with Trump.
The senator said that he offered Trump his border wall as a concession to seek movement on "Dreamers" who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, but later in the day on Friday Trump backed off the discussions.
Beyond that, in a White House press briefing Saturday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney lied about Schumer's offer on border wall funding, the doomed agreement that Schumer thought he was getting with Trump, only to be destroyed by House Speaker Paul Ryan and the nihilists who are pulling his strings.
The most likely person to help out on this is Vice President Mike Pence, because he actually has relationships in Congress and understands how it works, having served there. But he's as hands-off as he could possibly be—literally out of the country.
The lack of clarity and even effort from leadership leaves Democrats extremely wary and decrying the chaos. "'I'm concerned that we don't have an exit strategy," one Democratic aide for a liberal senator told NBC News. 'I think that it seems naive to think that Republicans will do the right thing here and compromise.'"
They won't do the right thing unless they are forced to, because they manufactured this crisis entirely for the worst reasons. This needs to be made very clear: This whole shutdown is about the refusal of Democrat to cede to Republicans' efforts to remake immigration policy, to impose their racism and xenophobia on it. There's a smattering of total Republican incompetence thrown in there, too, but it's mostly racism.