WASHINGTON • Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth was one of 28 Democratic senators who changed their votes Monday and approved a short-term budget extension, ending a government shutdown that had lasted through the weekend.
She said she decided to do so because of bipartisan agreements to resolve seemingly intractable issues on immigration, defense spending and other issues. But Duckworth was as clear about who she trusted, and who she didn’t, as the Senate voted to keep the government open until Feb. 8, and as Donald Trump’s White House claimed victory in a three-day showdown with Senate Democrats.
Meanwhile, her colleague, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., called it a “big moment” because “it’s the first time I've seen this large a group of Republicans and Democrats come in and try to hold the middle.”
Over the weekend, Duckworth, who lost both legs when a helicopter she was flying was shot down during the Iraq War, referred to Trump as a "five-deferment draft dodger."
So the trust gap won’t disappear in one fell swoop.
“I have no trust in the Republican leadership,” Duckworth told reporters after the vote, “but I am going to take a deep breath and show some trust in my 12 moderate Republican colleagues who were willing to step forward in this.”
Graham had said something similar in the midst of the weekend negotiations.
“A lot of people on our side don’t trust Chuck" Schumer, the Democratic leader, Graham said.
Those dozen Republicans were among about 25 senators, including McCaskill, who helped lead the Senate, at least temporarily, out of a political logjam that shut the government down over the weekend.
They met three times from Saturday through Monday morning. Their work helped force an 81-15 vote to re-open the government until at least Feb. 8, under the promise that Democrats will get a “level-playing field” on debate about 800,000 young people in the country under special legal status who were brought here illegally as children.
“The question now is how we move forward,” said Sen. Durbin, D-Ill., who has been pushing resolution of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, for years.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who has long denounced the Senate's dependency on short-term spending bills, said he hopes that lessons were learned.
"The Congress has handled funding the government so poorly for so long, and so far out of historical norms, that I think you’ll see more members recognizing that we have a broken process," he said. "We can’t keep operating on short-term funding bills that give the minority in the Senate the opportunity to attach any number of other issues to must-pass legislation."
McCaskill said Monday was, at least temporarily, a blow for bipartisanship.
“It's been so much about the extremes lately, and this instead was a big group of folks from both parties that wanted government to work, that wanted us to reach a consensus that would avoid these young people being deported, and avoid our government being shut down,” she said. “And that was really encouraging. ...Now I think we're all excited to try to keep the momentum going, and start applying it in other areas."
That’s fragile hope, given recent history.
The Senate in 2013 passed bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, only to see it die in the House, where resolution of issues like DACA faces hard-liners on the right, and where “resistors” on the Democratic left are reticent to give Trump a victory in anything.
Sixty-six House Democrats, including Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, voted Friday to proceed with Trump’s impeachment. Women's marches all over the country over the weekend, organized outside of the Democratic Party, called for more resistance to Trump.
Trump and Republicans will demand big concessions in any DACA debate, starting with funding for a wall on the border with Mexico.
The difference from 2013: Trump has put a March 5 deadline on resolving DACA, and Democrats are counting on public pressure.
“Folks who don’t want to have a solution are going to have to answer to the 80 percent of the American people who think that this is the right thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, and I am sure with an election around the corner folks may remember that,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.
The next two elections hung heavily over the mini-shutdown. Democrats were citing polls saying a plurality of voters blamed the Republicans more because they controlled both the Congress and the presidency, and they were already bullish on chances to take the House and Senate in November elections
But as Trump cut off negotiations with Schumer while hammering him on Twitter for causing the shutdown, the middle-out solution pushed that election-year calculus aside.
Still, five of the 16 Senate Democrats or Independents who voted against the deal are potential 2020 presidential candidates: Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Cory Booker, D-N.J.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. And Schumer took heavy criticism from his left wing for caving in to Trump.
"Chuck Schumer is the worst negotiator in Washington" who "let the entire Democratic Party down," said Marshed Zaheed, political director of the liberal group CREDO.
McCaskill was one of five Senate Democrats who voted to keep the government open Friday night. Three of the others, like her, face a tough re-election in a state Trump won handily.
Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, was the only member of Congress from the St. Louis region of either party to vote against the new short-term deal to re-open the government.
Schumer had said that negotiating with Trump was like dealing with jello, and some Republicans complained Trump was unclear as to exactly what he wanted as the shutdown came.
But White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “what the president did clearly worked.
“The vote just came in, 81-18,” she told reporters. “I would say those numbers are very much more in the president’s favor than Sen. Schumer’s favor. I am not sure what other positive things came out of this weekend for Democrats.”