US politics still roiled after end to 35-day shutdown

With the longest government shutdown in US history ended on its 35th day, attention has shifted to the economic and political fallout.

“Shutdowns are not good leverage in any negotiation,” Republican US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, urging congressional conferees to tackle border security in the three weeks of talks launched by Friday’s deal to end the impasse.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Democratic caucus, said on the same TV show that shutdowns were “not legitimate negotiating tactics” in public policy disagreements.

Russell Vought, acting chief of the Office of Management and Budget, has told government agencies to reopen “in a prompt and orderly manner”.

The measure that US President Donald Trump signed on Friday will fund the government for three weeks, as congressional negotiators attempt to work out a bill to fully fund agencies through Sept 30.

Trump also has said he might declare a national emergency at the border to circumvent Congress’ budgetary power by tapping Defense Department funds to pay for construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.

About 800,000 federal workers were furloughed or worked without pay during the shutdown, missing at least two paychecks.

“We hope that by the end of this week, all the back pay will be made up,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

Federal workers are owed about $6 billion in back pay, according to a study released last week.

That $6 billion is also roughly what financial rating agency Standard & Poor estimated the hit would be to US GDP during the shutdown.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator Rob Portman have introduced separate bills to prevent future shutdowns. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke favorably of them on Meet the Press.

Trump retreated on Friday from his demand for funding for the border wall. He also threatened to resume the shutdown on Feb 15 if he does not get what he wants.

The president sought $5.7 billion in wall funding as part of any measure to end the shutdown, which started when several agencies ran out of money on Dec 22 for reasons unrelated to immigration or border security.

Democrats opposed the request, kicking off the five-week standoff that resulted not only in reduced economic activity and hardship for federal workers, but delays at airports and closures of national parks.

Rubio said on NBC that an emergency option for the wall was “a terrible idea”.

A legal battle would put the administration “at the mercy of a District Court somewhere and ultimately an appellate court”, he said.

“It doesn’t provide certainty. You could very well wind up in sort of a theatric victory at the front end, and then not getting it done. ... The best way to do it is to have a law passed,” said the senator, who ran for president against Trump in 2016.

Democrats took something of a victory lap after the shutdown ended.

“No one should ever underestimate the speaker, as Donald Trump has learned,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said Friday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has had to quell a leadership challenge from her party’s left flank, appeared to have the upper hand, at least for now.

“Now — just weeks after reclaiming the speaker’s gavel — the California Democrat has already bested President Donald Trump in a gut-wrenching fight that may help define the 116th Congress, while strengthening her hold over rank-and-file lawmakers,” politico.com wrote.

“Amid a wave of news stories on furloughed federal workers showing up at food banks or in unemployment lines, airports across the country facing slowdowns, thousands of IRS employees who weren’t returning to the job when ordered back without pay — or, perhaps more so, the public blaming him for the chaos — Trump wilted. Pelosi held firm,” the story said.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, an early supporter of Trump’s, called herself “very stupid” for doing so. She made the comments on HBO’s Real Time, a talk show hosted by Bill Maher, a longtime critic of Trump’s.

On immigration, Coulter said: “It’s great for the rich ... bad for people who work.”

Earlier on Friday, after Trump ended the shutdown, Coulter tweeted: “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.”

“The government has now been reopened, and the Democrats have run out of excuses not to negotiate in good faith,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that favors stricter immigration policy, said in a statement. “We now have three weeks to find out whether reopening the government was a talking point or a true commitment on the part of congressional Democrats to address a national crisis.”

Meanwhile, it remained unclear when Trump would deliver his State of the Union address, originally scheduled for Jan 29 but postponed by Pelosi during the shutdown. The speech is traditionally given in the House chambers.

On Jan 17, Trump, citing the shutdown, canceled a trip by Pelosi’s delegation to Afghanistan on an Air Force jet.

Reuters contributed to this story.