Dem
47
GOP
53
All shutdowns are equal but some shutdowns are more equal. The one that began Saturday morning at 00:00:01 EST is in the latter category. With a lot of bad news for Donald Trump coming out of Minnesota—with no end in sight—Trump did something unexpected: He caved to the Democrats on Friday. He agreed to split DHS funding from the rest of the government funding. The Senate, following a bit of bloviating from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), passed five bipartisan bills funding 96% of the government for the rest of the fiscal year but gave DHS only 2 weeks' worth of funding. The vote was 71-29. The so-called "minibus" covers Defense, what is left of Education, Heath and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Transportation.
This is not entirely a done deal because the House was not in session Friday. Consequently, much of the government shut down Saturday morning, but since the government doesn't do much on weekends it wasn't noticed. The House is back in session today and will take up the bills in short order. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said the Democrats won't vote for the bills, so Speaker Mike Johnson will have to herd the cats to get them through on Republican votes alone. This will test his cat-herding skills to the limit. Jeffries doesn't want to help out for two reasons. First, he wants to put Johnson on the spot, trap him between the Freedom Caucus and the moderate Republicans in swing districts, and watch them tear him to bits. Second, some House Democrats don't want to give DHS even 2 weeks' funding and not playing ball here is a concession to them. However, these Democrats are taking a big risk. If the House doesn't sign off on the Senate bills, Trump might change his mind on the current deal, which strongly favors the Democrats. With Democrats, the enemy of the good isn't the bad, it's the perfect. Getting the Senate bills through puts the Democrats in a very strong position, and doing anything to jeopardize it is political malpractice.
The Republicans currently hold a 218-213 majority in the House, with four vacancies (the seats of former Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA; the late Doug LaMalfa, R-CA; Gov. Mikie Sherrill, D-NJ; and the late Sylvester Turner, D-TX). Turner's seat was filled on Saturday in a special election by Christian Menefee (D-TX), but he won't be seated until the election is certified. If Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) votes against the bills just to make some point, Johnson will have to work hard to earn his keep.
Assuming Johnson can get the bills though, then the fun begins—for the Democrats. They will then be in a win-win situation. They have a list of demands for their votes to fund DHS. If Trump concedes (and make no mistake, they will be negotiating with Trump since Senate Majority "Leader" John Thune, R-SD, has decided that legislating is just not his thing, while Johnson is too weak to lead on anything), they get their demands. A win! If Trump refuses to concede again, DHS (and thus, ICE) will shut down in 2 weeks. Many Democrats would consider that even better than getting their demands met.
In the upcoming negotiation with Trump, Democrats are going to use their well-tested tactic of having their opening bid be the absolute minimum they would accept, and then strategically giving up bits and pieces of it to get a deal. There are better ways to make deals. People have even written books about the art of the deal. Democrats are expected to beg for these minor changes to ICE: (1) officers may not wear masks, (2) officers must wear body cameras, (3) no more roving patrols, and (4) to break into someone's house, a warrant from a Senate-confirmed Art. III judge is needed.
These are mostly focused on procedural matters. Democrats could additionally demand changes that will motivate individual officers to avoid killing people. For example: (1) remove all immunity from officers violating state or federal law; (2) set the death penalty for officers convicted in state or federal court of murder, even while on the job; (3) require ICE and DHS to turn over all evidence requested by a state AG or county DA investigating the commission of state crimes; (4) No ICE within 2 miles of a polling place and (5) require 92 (that's 45 + 47—get it) days of training for officers, including at least one day on the constitutional rights of citizens to observe, record, and protest ICE actions and the criminal and civil exposure officers have for violating these rights. An even stronger demand would be to ban ICE from operating more than 100 miles from the international border. ICE is an immigration agency and there is not a lot of immigration directly into, say, Nebraska. Many more items could be added.
Of course, Trump would blow a gasket when he saw this list. In that case, Democrats could politely reply: "We understand completely. Let's just forget funding DHS altogether and move onto something more important, like getting the rest of the Epstein files out there." Due to the killings in Minneapolis, Democrats have accidentally been put in a very powerful negotiating position, but they are so used to being a weak position and then caving, they don't seem to know how to handle it. (V)