“I voted both times to open the government,” Romney said after the vote. “I’ll continue to vote to open our government and get people back to work.” Alexander expressed a similar sentiment: “I voted twice today to open the government because it should never have been shut down. It is always wrong for either side to use shutting down the government as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations — it should be as off-limits as chemical weapons are to warfare.”
It wasn’t just the number of Republican senators who chose to publicly oppose Trump either. It was who they were.
Collins and Gardner are both up for re-election in 2020, and are major targets for Democrats.
That they voted for the Democratic proposal is a very clear signal to Trump and McConnell that simply keeping the government closed until Democrats give Trump $5 billion for the wall isn’t politically tenable.
That Republicans hold a losing hand here, and the time has come to fold.
The votes for the Democratic plan by Alexander and Romney send a different but still very important signal. Both are pillars of the Republican establishment who have been at this for a very long time. (Both men have served as governors and ran for president twice unsuccessfully before serving in the Senate.) Their votes are meant to signal to Trump that none of this is good for the GOP brand in the near-, medium- or long-term — and that if he doesn’t do something about it, they just might.
It’s no accident that after both bills failed, McConnell asked to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York). Of course McConnell knew neither proposal would succeed and, because he is McConnell, likely knew that six GOPers would go against Trump and vote for the Democratic proposal.
What the post-vote meeting was about was, again, signal-sending to this White House. And that signal was unmistakable: It’s time to talk. And time to deal.
Now the question is whether Trump was listening — or even cares. The initial reaction out of the White House was somewhat non-committal; said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders: “Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Chuck Schumer are meeting now to see whether or not they can work out of the deadlock. As was made clear to Sen. Lindsay Graham, the three-week CR would only work if there is a large down payment on the wall.”
Is Trump ready to deal? That depends on how he defines “large down payment.” But what is obvious now is this: Senate Republicans — or at least something nearing a critical bloc of them — have had enough of this shutdown.
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