The government shut down for the first time since 2013 on Friday night, and lawmakers are scrambling to reach a deal.
The shutdown happened when the Senate failed to reach 60 votes on a procedural motion to pass a stopgap bill that the House passed. The total was 50-49. The proposal that failed would have provided funding to the government through February 16.
According to CNN, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said on Saturday that they were getting closer to reaching a deal, but that DACA was still a problem—one that the GOP needs to address.
"Look it's their mess, the President created it," Sen. Kaine told CNN. "We’re here where we are because there’s a budget calendar ... they didn’t wanna do that, they wanted to spend 10 months getting rid of Obamacare ... we’re here on a DACA crisis because the President created a crisis."
According to CNN, the White House is willing to engage in DACA negotiations, but won't do so until the government reopens.
"We will not negotiate the status of 690,000 unlawful immigrants while hundreds of millions of tax paying Americans, including hundreds of thousands of our troops in uniform and border agents protecting our country are held hostage by Senate Democrats," Marc Short, the director of White House Legislative Affairs, said. "And we remain to continue to be anxious to reach a deal on DACA and we look forward to resuming the negotiations as soon as the Senate Democrats reopen the government."
Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to cast blame back on the democratic party. He tweeted on Saturday that democrats are "far more concerned about illegal immigrants" than they are with Americans "safety" at our "dangerous Southern Border."
According to a separate CNN report, Trump has allegedly been murmuring privately that democrats caused the shutdown too, but that he's going to be blamed.
Perhaps, the biggest hypocrisy of all though lies in an interview Trump did with Meredith Vieira on NBC's Today Show in 2011. When Vieira asked Trump if he would be OK with a shutdown under former President Barack Obama, he said:
"In my opinion – you know, I hear the Democrats are going to be blamed and the Republicans are going to be blamed. I actually think the president would be blamed. If there is a shutdown, and it’s not going to be a horrible shutdown because, as you know, things will sort of keep going…. If there is a shutdown I think it would be a tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States. He’s the one that has to get people together."
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