Senate in last-minute talks to find deal to avert shutdown 

Vice President Pence, incoming White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House adviser Jared Kushner met with Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) on Friday afternoon in a last-ditch effort to avoid a partial government shutdown.

Funding for 25 percent of the federal government is due to expire at the end of Friday absent a deal.

The meeting with senior administration officials and the Democratic leader is one of several negotiations taking place in the Senate on Friday as lawmakers wrangles over how to deal with a House-passed bill that keeps the government funded until Feb. 8 and also provides $5.7 billion for a border wall. 

A motion to proceed to the House bill sat stalled on the Senate floor for most of the afternoon Friday with the vote frozen 44-46 — short of the majority needed to move it. 

President Trump earlier in the day warned he is ready to shut the government down over the border wall and blamed Democrats for obstruction, while reversing his comments last week that he would own such a shutdown.

“The Democrats now own the shutdown!” Trump tweeted Friday.

The president also warned on Twitter that a shutdown “will last for a very long time.”

Retiring Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) are trying to negotiate a bipartisan deal with Democrats that could pass both chambers, win the president’s signature and avoid a government shutdown.

Flake and Corker were spotted chatting with Democratic centrists including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Angus King (I-Maine) on the Senate floor.

Flake is pushing a deal that would reauthorize the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in exchange for border wall funding. 

Flake voted against a motion to proceed to the House-passed stopgap because Democrats have vowed to defeat it and he wants to find a resolution sooner instead of later. 

“I don’t see any reason to proceed to a bill that can’t pass,” said Flake told reporters after meeting with GOP colleagues on how to proceed. 

He said he wants to “find a bill that can pass.”

“I think one that could — if we’re going to reopen this thing to add more money for a wall or steel slats, or whatever you want to call it, then throw DACA in too,” Flake said, adding that several colleagues support his position. 

Republicans currently control 51 seats and Democrats control 49, which means the motion could fail if another GOP senator votes “no.” 

Ten senators, however, had not voted as of 4 p.m. as some of them have already left town for the Christmas break.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has suggested that colleagues find a compromise based on the Homeland Security funding bill that the Senate Appropriations Committee passed in June by a margin of 26-5.

That bill would provide $1.6 billion for border fencing, which is more than the $1.3 billion that Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) have proposed in their latest offer to Trump. 

“All along I’ve thought, out of respect to the presidency, we ought to give him what he asked for. What he asked for is $1.6 billion in this appropriations year,” Alexander said, referring to Trump and the White House’s budget request.

“The Senate voted for that and that included many Democrats. So there’s an area where the president and the Democrats have agreed. That would seem to me a pretty good place to start,” he said. 

Only Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) voted against that bill in committee.

Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune (S.D.) said Congress could vote on various levels of border security funding, such as the $1.6 billion for border fencing and $1 billion for immigration-related matters that McConnell offered to Democrats earlier in the week.  

“I suspect that if that vote doesn’t prevail — and I hopes it prevails — then I think we probably have to huddle up with the House and figure out what the next steps are,” Thune said. 

“There could be a lot of iterations of things you could do. You could collapse the amount, meet the Democrats somewhere [in the middle,]” he said, referring to border wall funding.