Trading Blame for the Shutdown, Lawmakers Search for a Deal to End It

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WASHINGTON — With much of the federal government shut down, the House and Senate were reconvening for a rare Saturday session, hoping to find a way to restart the flow of funds at least temporarily.

But even as they tried to cooperate, Republicans and Democrats simultaneously blamed each other for the crisis, which unfolded one year to the day after President Trump’s inauguration. The shutdown risks political peril for both sides, and lawmakers continued to insist on Saturday that they were eager for a resolution.

The likeliest path for lawmakers to reopen the government is to agree on a stopgap spending measure that stretches longer than the few days that Senate Democrats want, but shorter than the four weeks that the House approved on Thursday night.

But agreeing on the length of the stopgap bill — essentially, a matter of circling a date on the calendar — is complicated by a number of contentious issues that lawmakers have yet to resolve, particularly the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.

By Saturday morning, there was talk of a compromise, but the path to securing a deal that could pass the Senate still seemed hazy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, is proposing to shorten the temporary spending bill so that it would expire Feb. 8 instead of Feb. 16 — an extension of three weeks instead of four.

But Senate Democrats did not immediately get on board with that idea, and it was not clear when a vote on the proposal might be held.

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“Something like that is a prescription for trouble,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Friday night, arguing that a period shorter than three weeks would encourage decisions on pressing issues.

The shutdown, the first since 2013, took effect after the vast majority of Senate Democrats joined with a handful of Republicans to block the spending bill that had passed the House.

The vote came after a day of great uncertainty, with a meeting between Mr. Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, raising the specter of a last-minute deal. But that never materialized.

“All I know is that love is the answer,” said Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana. “But there doesn’t seem to be much around here right now.”

To reopen the government, at least a dozen or so Senate Democrats will most likely need to agree to any deal, since 60 votes will be required for the measure to clear the Senate. The House would then have to give its approval as well. House members had been scheduled to leave town on Friday for a weeklong recess, but members were advised to remain in Washington given the possible need to vote on a Senate compromise.

Early Saturday morning, Mr. Schumer called for the president to sit down with congressional leaders from both parties to work out a deal that would allow the government to be open on Monday.

“When President Trump decides he is finally ready to lead his party to a deal, Democrats will be ready, willing and eager to clinch it,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.

But Republicans, who moved swiftly to brand the crisis as the “Schumer shutdown,” did not seem eager to make concessions, and, in effect, reward Democrats for largely opposing the stopgap bill.

Mr. Trump assailed Democrats on Twitter early Saturday morning, pointing to the shutdown as a reason that more Republicans needed to be elected in the midterm elections this year.

The fate of the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers is central to the standoff between the two parties. In September, Mr. Trump moved to end an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which shielded those immigrants from deportation. The president gave Congress until early March to come up with a solution, and Democrats are eager to secure a deal that would protect the Dreamers.

But the White House is taking a firm stance about entertaining immigration demands while the government is closed.

“We will not negotiate the status of unlawful immigrants while Democrats hold our lawful citizens hostage over their reckless demands,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, who described Senate Democrats as “obstructionist losers.”

Representative Doug LaMalfa, Republican of California, argued that Democrats should not “hold 320 million Americans ransom” over helping “a handful of illegal immigrants.” And Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said his Democratic colleagues had miscalculated their leverage.

“The minority needs to recognize they’re the minority,” Mr. Tillis said. “Any time you come up with a posture that almost suggests that you’re negotiating from the position of the majority of the body, it’s not a very good look.”

But Democrats argued that it was in fact the ineptitude of Republicans — particularly of Mr. Trump, whom they describe as an erratic and unreliable negotiating partner — that had led to the shutdown.

“Despite controlling the House, the Senate and the White House, the Republicans were so incompetent, so negligent, that they couldn’t get it together to keep government open,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said on Saturday morning after the House came into session.

Hours before the shutdown, Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer had closed in on a deal. But those talks eventually fell apart, and once the government closed, Mr. Schumer placed the blame squarely on the president, who he said walked away from an agreement.

Mr. Schumer described the “Trump shutdown” as a “perfect encapsulation of the chaos he’s unleashed on our government.”

“Instead of living up to the great deal maker he marketed himself to be,” Mr. Schumer said, “he’s been the single driving force in scuttling bipartisan deals in Congress.”