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.