As the clock ticked past 2:30 a.m. Friday, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) walked off the Senate floor and cracked a joke about the strange dysfunction that gripped the Capitol.

“Hey, Doug,” said Shelby, 83, a four-decade veteran of Congress. “Welcome to the Senate!”

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), enduring his second shutdown and the latest of several late-night sessions just five weeks into ­office, couldn’t believe how late things got resolved to end a brief government shutdown that no one seemed to want. “I was just saying: I haven’t been up this late since college,” Jones, 63, told Shelby.

It would take another three hours for the House to pass the Senate’s massive fiscal compromise and, finally, until just past 8:30 a.m. Friday for President Trump to announce that he had signed the legislation reopening the government after a brief overnight shutdown.

As Shelby let his junior colleague know, these overnight sessions are starting to become semiregular around here, with each side viewing the countdown clock to some shutdown or expiration of existing law as a potential leverage point.

It’s becoming such old hat that, this time around, there was not much in terms of actual drama, other than the sheer ire directed at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), whose grandstanding delay tactics pushed the votes well past the midnight deadline and started what was really only a technical shutdown.

“It’s a colossal waste of everybody’s time,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), a member of the Republican leadership. Had Paul relented, the Senate could have voted earlier Friday and given the House enough time to approve the sweeping legislation.

But the Kentucky senator, once a darling of the conservative tea party movement, lashed out at his fellow Republicans for reneging on their old deficit-conscious ways and instead embracing legislation that boosted federal agency spending by more than $300 billion this year alone.

Paul wanted a vote on an amendment that would have embarrassed his fellow Republicans, calling for fiscal restraint, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to give in. So, Paul held the floor until after midnight, as the rules allowed, briefly shutting down the government.

He got nothing in return for his delay tactics, something that has come to grate on his colleagues. “He never gets a result,” Thune said.

However, Paul said he drove home a point and did so at minimum distraction to the average American. “Last night, for a few hours, your government shut down. Most likely, you slept soundly while this happened. The sun rose, and the world went on,” Paul wrote Friday in an op-ed for Time.

Indeed, the world went on, practically ignoring the melodrama.

The last time Congress tumbled into a government shutdown — all of three weeks ago — the Capitol was abuzz. Liberal groups staged a rally in Upper Senate Park, cheering on Senate Democrats as they demanded a Dream Act as part of any spending bill. The party’s leaders sniped on the Senate floor, trying to frame the debate by blaming one another for disaster.

The mood during Friday morning’s shutdown was funereal, if not bored. Many of the undocumented immigrants who had rallied across the Capitol and its office buildings had left for the day, leaving the hallways and the parks outside dark and quiet. Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), the retiring Democrat who has been one of the immigrants’ most active supporters, ate dinner with a few activists, saying in earshot of reporters that there were perhaps 60 Democratic votes in the House to pass a spending deal without a carve-out for them.

“I think the young people are pretty dejected right now,” said Winnie Wong, an organizer who had participated in the protests.

In 2015, when a Paul-led filibuster briefly halted the renewal of the Patriot Act — and when the presidential primaries were gearing up — dozens of supporters rallied outside.

This time, there were some supportive tweets, and one supporter of Paul clad in a “Students for Rand” T-shirt from his campaign waited on the second floor of the Senate to cheer him. (He declined to give his name.)

That was it for the cheering gallery. Paul’s colleagues were more than happy to jeer.

“You haven’t convinced 60 senators or 51 senators that your idea is good enough for them to support,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who had campaigned with Paul before his come-from-behind 2014 victory. “Go to work. Build a coalition. Make a difference. You can make a point all you want. But points are forgotten. There’s not a whole lot of history books about the great points of the American Senate.”

As they trudged to the 1 a.m. vote to advance the spending bill, Paul’s colleagues bemoaned a “pointless” evening.

Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) arrived at the vote wearing an Eagles cap, reflecting on how brinkmanship had stopped him and other fans of the Super Bowl-winning team from celebrating.

“You know, I had tickets to the Eagles-Vikings game, which I missed because of the shutdown,” said Coons, who lives about 30 miles south of Philadelphia’s football stadium. “What a wonderful confluence of events that I missed the Eagles parade today because of the shutdown.”

House members got some sleep, if they wanted, as they had a 12-hour break between Thursday afternoon and early Friday morning votes. A liberal uprising, led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), left the outcome in some doubt as Democrats were demanding guaranteed votes to protect the “dreamers.”

But the odds always favored passage, as Democrats had won many concessions on key domestic policy priorities that were too much to pass up.

By 5:33 a.m., the gavel fell and some bleary-eyed lawmakers headed for the exits.

By then, Shelby had already had a few hours’ sleep.

Read more at PowerPost

SAN DIEGO — The federal judge whom President Trump characterized during his campaign as “a Mexican” and therefore biased against him said he would announce a ruling next week that could determine whether the government can proceed with its expedited plans to build a border wall.

District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel is presiding over a lawsuit filed by advocacy groups and the state of California challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to bypass standard environmental-impact studies and rapidly expand barriers along the Mexican border.

Curiel said Friday that DHS has yet to explain why it must proceed so urgently in its construction plans.

“By waving environmental protections, we are ignoring something that has been very important to Congress for the past 40, 50 years,” the judge told government attorneys. He asked them to provide more information by Tuesday and said he would issue his ruling soon after.

Galen N. Thorp, a government attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security, said DHS’s plans were consistent with congressional authorizations.

“This case is about plaintiffs’ opposition to Congress’s decision that border infrastructure can, in certain circumstances, be a higher priority” than environmental laws, Thorp said.

Plaintiffs in the suit argue that environmental waivers granted by Congress a decade ago involving matters of crucial border security cannot be applied to future wall construction. A ruling against DHS would likely delay the Trump administration’s plans to move rapidly if Congress provides billions in funding for the wall.

The plaintiffs said they are not challenging the government’s right to replace or maintain existing barriers, only “the projects they want to do now,” said Michael Cayaban, an attorney for the state of California.

Curiel was the judge in an unrelated class-action lawsuit against the president’s now-defunct Trump University, and the judge’s alleged bias against Trump became a running theme during his presidential campaign.

At a rally here in May 2016 that triggered protests, Trump blasted Curiel as “a hater of Donald Trump,” then continued to lash out after the judge ordered the release of internal Trump University documents related to the suit requested by The Washington Post.

Trump told supporters at the time that Curiel harbored a bias against the candidate’s plans for a border wall because the judge was “Spanish” and “a Mexican.”

Curiel’s parents were immigrants from Mexico. He was born in Indiana.

“Look, he’s proud of his heritage, okay?” Trump said of Curiel in a June 2016 interview with CNN. “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”

Trump’s remarks were widely condemned at the time, but Curiel did not respond publicly. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle the fraud claims in March, soon after moving into the White House.

[The judge Trump disparaged as ‘Mexican’ will preside over border wall case]

Brian Segee, the lead attorney for the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in the suit, said his group is challenging DHS’s attempt to bypass standard procedure.

“Did Congress intend, as we argue, to limit the unprecedented and sweeping authority of the DHS secretary to do away with laws at will?” Segee said in an interview Friday. “Was that limited to specific fencing projects that have already been completed? Or was it perpetual authority that can be invoked now, or 10 years or 20 years from now?”

Trump is seeking $25 billion for enhanced border security, including hundreds of miles of new barrier construction. About one-third of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico has some form of wall or fencing, and the president’s proposal would extend the structure by about 300 miles, while replacing another 400 miles with more formidable barriers.

DHS is evaluating eight wall prototypes that are on exhibit outside San Diego, and each one is taller and more elaborate than almost anything currently in place.

[A look at Trump’s border wall prototypes]

Environmental groups suing the government say additional barriers will harm wildlife by cutting off their natural migration routes or access to the waters of the Rio Grande.

Stretching from the southern Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico, the river spans nearly two-thirds of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, passing through arid mountain regions and deserts where it is a vital water source for farmers, ranchers and wildlife. Large fauna cross the border in other remote areas where the international boundary is little more than a line on a map.

“The wall could preclude the movement of endangered species or other animals, like the jaguar, that move back and forth, leading to their potential extirpation in the United States,” Segee said.

New wall construction is likely to happen first on federally protected lands, including parks and wildlife sanctuaries because the government already owns the property.

The president’s wall-building blueprints also call for thousands of miles of new roadways along the border to provide access for maintenance crews and law enforcement.

Miroff reported from Washington.