In Cairo, Pence praises the friendship and partnership between the US and Egypt

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Vice President Pence, center left, and his delegation meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, center right, and his delegation at the presidential palace in Cairo on Jan. 20. (Khaled Desouki/pool via AP)

CAIRO — On Saturday, the first day of the federal government shutdown, Vice President Pence arrived here in the late afternoon to meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, whom he praised and repeatedly called a “friend” of the United States.

The leaders spent roughly four hours together and delivered brief statements before a small group of reporters who are traveling with Pence — a nearly nine-minute event that only happened after intense negotiation between Pence’s staff and Egyptian authorities, who wanted to limit access to one television camera with limited sound and, at one point, physically barred reporters from leaving a bus.

Sitting in gold-gilded chairs in front of an intricate tapestry showing a map of Egypt, Sissi said through an interpreter that Pence is a “dear guest” and that his visit “speaks volumes” about Egypt’s relationship with the Trump administration. Pence said that the two countries had been “drifting apart” until Trump took office but that their “ties have never been stronger,” especially as they work together to fight terrorism in the region. He added that he chose to visit Egypt first on his four-day, three-country Middle East tour because of the importance of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.

[Pence’s hopes for Middle East trip likely to crash into reality on the ground]

Pence denounced a terrorist attack on an Egyptian mosque in November that killed more than 300, along with recent attacks on Coptic Christians.

The public comments were warm and friendly with no mention of the disagreements between the two countries, such as President Trump’s decision late last year to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and that Egypt has imprisoned several American citizens, often on questionable charges. As Pence prepared to leave on Saturday night, he told reporters that both of these issues came up in private conversations.

Pence arrived at the presidential palace late Saturday afternoon, along with a bus carrying the 12 reporters who are traveling with him in the Middle East this week. A CNN journalist with a video camera left the bus, but then an Egyptian official planted himself in front of the door and would not allow anyone else to leave. One of Pence’s staff members firmly told the man that he needed to let everyone out, but he refused to move, forcing her to shout out the windows to others who might be able to help.

After about three minutes, reporters were allowed off the bus but they could not take cellphones, cameras or laptops into the palace. For about 90 minutes, the reporters waited in a lavish room in the palace as the vice president’s communications staff tried to convince Egyptian authorities to allow reporters to see part of the meeting. The Egyptians eventually relented when Pence learned what had happened and requested that reporters be briefly allowed inside.

After two meetings, the two leaders and their top aides had dinner together. Pence then flew to Amman, Jordan, where he is scheduled to have a similar meeting with King Abdullah II on Sunday.

Before taking off, Pence told reporters traveling with him that he and Sissi discussed terrorism, isolating North Korea, religious freedom, the need for make changes Egypt’s oversight of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and “the situation for two Americans who are currently being held, imprisoned here in Egypt.”

The two Americans in question are Mostafa Kassem and Ahmed Etiwy, who the United States contends were both wrongfully imprisoned in 2013. Sissi assured him he would give their cases “very serious attention” and “personal attention,” Pence said.

“I told him we’d like to see those American citizens restored to their families and restored to our country,” he said.

On Jerusalem, Pence said that he heard Sissi out and reaffirmed that Trump is committed to maintaining the status quo when it comes to Holy Sites in Jerusalem and a final resolution on boundaries will be decided in the peace process. If both sides agree, the United States would support a two state solution, according to Pence. “My perception was that he was encouraged by that message,” he said.

Pence called the overall meeting very productive.

“I will leave Egypt very encouraged by the conversations and even more grateful for the strong strategic partnership that the United States enjoys with Egypt,” he said.

The vice president’s trip is happening despite the federal government shutdown in the United States. Pence’s press secretary, Alyssa Farah, said Friday that the “vice president’s meetings with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Israel are integral to America’s national security and diplomatic objectives.”

Air Force Two was over the Atlantic Ocean when news came that Congress had not reached agreement on a spending deal and that the government would immediately shut down. Pence received the news from his chief of staff, Nick Ayers, who then briefed reporters on the plane and distributed a written statement from the vice president.

About three hours later, the plane stopped to refuel at Ireland’s Shannon Airport. Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, spent about 20 minutes in the terminal talking with dozens of young members of the Air Force who were headed to Kuwait, many for their first deployment. The couple spent most of the time posing for photos, shaking hands and thanking the troops for their service — but the shutdown also came up, as service members and other federal employees will not receive their paychecks until the shutdown ends.

“We’ll get this thing figured out in Washington,” Pence said after one group photo. “You guys stay focused on your mission.”

As he prepared to return to Air Force Two, Pence spoke with reporters — despite urging from his wife that they needed to stay on schedule and get back on the plane — about his interactions with the troops, using it as an opportunity to attack Democrats as not doing enough to avoid a shutdown. When one reporter noted that members of the vice president’s party voted against a short-term spending bill and that some Democrats voted for it, Pence said that responsibility falls primarily with Democrats in the Senate.

“Democrats in the Senate — with a few exceptions on either side — chose to put politics ahead of our national defense, put politics ahead of meeting the obligations of our national government,” he said, standing in an airport food court. “And that’s just unacceptable. It’s disappointing.”

When asked how long the shutdown might last, Pence said, “It’s going to take as long as it takes.” He said that members of Congress need to “do their job” and quickly end the impasse.

Protesters gather for a second Women’s March in nation’s capital

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Thousands of demonstrators gathered Saturday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and lined the frozen-over Reflecting Pool to rally for women’s rights, urge women to run for public office and call on citizens to fully engage on issues from sexual assault and racial equality to immigrant protections and gun violence.

The Women’s March on Washington was one of many such protests taking place in hundreds of cities and towns across the nation.

People in the crowd were upbeat and blinking into the bright, sunny day, with temperatures soaring into the high 50s. Many said they were encouraged by recent Democratic electoral wins in Alabama, where black women were instrumental in electing the state’s first Democratic senator since 1992, and in Virginia, where a record number of women won state legislative office.

The rally, which took place hours after the government shutdown that began at midnight, was organized to rekindle the activism and civic participation ignited by the massive Women’s March on Washington held the day after President Trump’s inauguration last year. Organizers said they hope to build on efforts that have pushed women’s issues to the forefront during the politically chaotic year since Trump took office.

That message was delivered repeatedly by a number of speakers, including top Democratic leaders, many of whom remained in Washington because of the shutdown.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) led more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers on the stage and told the marchers they had “transformed the world.”

“Your truth is never more important than now,” she said.

Pelosi pointed out that many more people had turned out for last year’s march than had attended Trump’s inauguration, and she said the president deserves an F for his first year in office.

Trump, at the White House, weighed in on the marches: “Beautiful weather all over our great country, a perfect day for all Women to March,” he tweeted. “Get out there now to celebrate the historic milestones and unprecedented economic success and wealth creation that has taken place over the last 12 months. Lowest female unemployment in 18 years!”

At the rally, there were few Trump supporters to be found. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, protesters held up a sign that spelled out “Impeach#45” on one side and “Narcissist” on the other. Another carried a sign that referenced a villain and heroine in the Harry Potter series: “When Voldemort is president we need a nation of Hermiones.” Others made the coming fall elections their focus, proclaiming “Blue tsunami coming in 2018” and “Grab ’em by the midterms.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), often mentioned as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, also addressed the crowd.

“It is women who are holding our democracy together in these dangerous times,” she said.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) drew cheers when he criticized Republican congressional leaders and Trump. “ I am sure that if Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the president were women, we would not be in the middle of a government shutdown right now,” Beyer said.

“Please run! Run smart! Run hard!” he urged the crowd.

Last year’s march “was a rallying cry for a lot of women who wanted their voices to be heard,” said Emily Patton, a spokeswoman for the Women’s March. “This year, we really want to show support for women who are running for office and to encourage more women, women of color and those in the LGBT community, to run for office, to register to vote, to be more civically engaged.”

Lauren Owensby, 51, a Sterling, Va., mother with five daughters, said she has a “house full of feminists” who have been on fire since Trump was elected. She brought two of her daughters to the march, as well as her mother, “an activist for 60 years.”

The federal contractor said her community went into high gear last year.

“After Trump was elected, you have never seen so many people come out of their suburban doors and say they want to get involved,” she said.

There have been coffees, cocktail parties, letter writing — all aimed at opposing Trump and helping get women and Democrats elected in Virginia.

“Women are working, raising families and resisting,” Owensby said. “We don’t read books. We don’t watch movies anymore. We don’t have any time.”

Dilcia M. Molina held up a sign in Spanish calling for the protection of immigrant women. She is a health program manager at a D.C. clinic that works with immigrants.

“We want to demonstrate that immigrant women have a right to live without violence, without ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] looking for them,” she said. “We all immigrated for some reason, because of violence in our countries, because of poverty.”

Judy Glaven, 57, brought the same “Be Brave Choose Love” poster she marched with last year. It is covered with tape because she has taken it to so many demonstrations over the past year.

“Last year I was in shock and depressed. Now I feel determined. I am going to keep working at this,” said the molecular cell biologist from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington. She said that since last year’s march, she has met with senators and representatives, organized her neighbors, and gone to dozens of protests. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t do something,” she said.

Victor Udoewa, a technology policy adviser, was changing his daughter’s diaper while his wife got ready to sing with her social-justice a cappella choir for the assembling marchers. He said the last year has been revealing more than anything, and in some positive ways. “People thought we were further along with sexism and racism than we are,” he said.

After the rally at the Lincoln Memorial, many made their way over to Lafayette Square in front of the White House, where impromptu protests continued.

Saturday’s rally felt quieter and calmer than last year’s, but not everything went smoothly. A number of frustrated marchers found that the public restrooms near the Reflecting Pool were closed. A note posted by the National Park Service explained that this was due to the shutdown.

There were also a few showdowns between marchers and antiabortion protesters, who held up large photos showing aborted fetuses and advertised numbers to call for women facing a crisis pregnancy. Abortion rights activists stood in front of the protesters or blocked their messages with anti-Trump signs.

Washington was the focus of last year’s Women’s March, with hundreds of thousands of protesters filling the streets of the capital. Some of the larger marches held Saturday were in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Charlotte and New York.

One of the biggest events will take place Sunday in Las Vegas, where a concerted effort is being made to push for voter registration. Democrats are eyeing the U.S. Senate race in swing state Nevada, where incumbent Dean Heller (R) is considered vulnerable and first-term Rep. Jacky Rosen (D) is a leading challenger. The Las Vegas rally will also focus on gun violence and sexual assault and is expected to include speeches by Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, actress Marisa Tomei and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).

Kayla Epstein and Erin Logan contributed to this report.

Congressman Combating Harassment Settled His Own Misconduct Case

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Mr. Meehan called on the former aide to waive the confidentiality agreement in the settlement “to ensure a full and open airing of all the facts.” Mr. Elizandro did not respond to follow-up questions about why Mr. Meehan had agreed to the settlement and the confidentiality provision if the allegations were false.

Alexis Ronickher, a lawyer for the former aide, called Mr. Meehan’s statement “a desperate effort to preserve his career.” She said the congressman had demanded confidentiality in the first place, and was now asking her client to waive it knowing that she would not agree because she “prizes her privacy above all else.”

After this article was published online, AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, said that Mr. Meehan was being removed immediately from the House Ethics Committee, where he has helped investigate sexual misconduct claims, and that the panel would investigate the allegations against him. In addition, Mr. Ryan told Mr. Meehan that he should repay the taxpayer funds, Ms. Strong said.

Sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men across a range of industries in recent months have prompted a national conversation about gender dynamics in the workplace, and the inadequacy of support systems for victims. In Congress, several lawmakers have left office or announced their retirements in recent months over sexual harassment claims.

Still, Congress remains a workplace where victims say they have few effective avenues for recourse.

Mr. Meehan’s case sheds new light on secretive congressional processes for handling such complaints, which advocates say are slanted to favor abusers, allowing them to use the vast resources of the federal government to intimidate, isolate and silence their victims.

As a member of the Ethics Committee, Mr. Meehan was tasked with being a part of the solution. The panel has initiated investigations into sexual misconduct claims against at least four congressmen in recent months. Two have resigned: Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan. The other two, Blake Farenthold, Republican of Texas, and Ruben Kihuen, a freshman Democrat from Nevada, remain in office but have said they will not seek re-election.

Mr. Meehan has been pushing for protections for domestic violence victims since his time as a local prosecutor. In Congress, he has sponsored legislation mandating the reporting of sexual violence, and he is a member of a bipartisan congressional task force to end such violence.

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This account is based on interviews with 10 people, including friends and former colleagues of the former aide and others who worked around the office. The New York Times is not naming the former aide, who followed the recommended procedures for reporting harassment but came away from the experience feeling traumatized, according to several people with whom she shared her feelings.

Mr. Meehan’s family was close to the former aide, according to friends and colleagues, and she was regarded as an integral employee in the office, according to people who worked in or around the office. They said Mr. Meehan seemed to favor her over other employees, so much so that others saw his favoritism as unprofessional. He expressed interest in her personal relationships outside the office, then seemed to become jealous in April when word spread through the office about the aide’s boyfriend. After Mr. Meehan’s professions of attraction and subsequent hostility, the woman filed a complaint with the congressional Office of Compliance over the summer, alleging sexual harassment.

The handling of that complaint — which included an aggressive pushback by representatives from Mr. Meehan’s office and congressional lawyers, who suggested she had misinterpreted the congressman’s behavior — demoralized the aide. It led to her estrangement from her colleagues, and isolation from friends, family and her boyfriend, according to the people in whom she confided. It set her back financially and professionally, as she continued to pay legal costs associated with the complaint even after leaving her job in Mr. Meehan’s office and struggling to find a new one. She moved back in with her parents and ultimately decided to start a new life abroad.

Mr. Meehan was represented in this process by two officials from his congressional office and two lawyers for the House’s office of employment counsel.

After counseling and mediation sessions mandated by the Office of Compliance, the sides reached an agreement that included a settlement and a strict nondisclosure agreement, according to people familiar with the process.

The exact amount of the settlement could not be determined, partly because Mr. Meehan’s office paid it from a congressional office fund that allows such payments to be disguised as salary and reported months after they were made. But people familiar with the payout said it was thousands of dollars.

Several of those interviewed traced the woman’s difficulties in Mr. Meehan’s office to 2016, when a senior male member of the office staff professed his romantic attraction to the woman. She reported the advance to Mr. Meehan, and the senior employee left his job after reaching an agreement with Mr. Meehan, according to a person with direct knowledge of the episode who worked in the office. Not long after, Mr. Meehan signaled his own romantic desires to the woman.

The aide’s dealings with the Office of Compliance left her feeling as if the settlement was not worth the emotional distress the process had caused, said the friends and former colleagues. All spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because they were concerned that, if lawyers for Mr. Meehan or the House accused the woman of violating the nondisclosure agreement, her settlement could be withdrawn and her career prospects further damaged.

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Other women who have endured the complaint process have suffered personal and professional consequences.

“I tried to get another job with another member of Congress, and I was blackballed. Nobody wanted to touch me,” said Marion Brown, who filed the complaint that led to Mr. Conyers’s resignation, and who was not speaking about the Meehan case. “And I’m still going through backlash, because he resigned without admitting doing anything wrong.”

Under federal law, accusers must undergo a confidential process in which co-workers who might be able to provide corroborating evidence are excluded. They often must wait about three months before filing an official complaint, yet they must initiate the process no later than 180 days after the offending behavior. Once the process is initiated, accusers must submit to up to 30 days of counseling and complete another 30 days of mediation.

Ms. Ronickher, the lawyer for Mr. Meehan’s accuser, declined to comment on the specifics of her case. But Ms. Ronickher, who has represented multiple congressional aides who have filed sexual harassment complaints with the Office of Compliance, said, “Given the proven dysfunction of the process as we have it now, it’s critical that Congress act on legislation to revise the process so that victims aren’t re-harmed when they pursue their rights.”

Several proposals are pending before Congress to overhaul the harassment reporting process, and some would bar payouts from House members’ office accounts.

Mr. Meehan’s accuser paid her own lawyers’ fees, and the settlement she reached was not enough to cover her legal and living expenses while she was out of work, according to a person with whom she discussed her finances.

The congressman has been regarded as a target for Democrats because his district, which is considered among the nation’s most gerrymandered, was carried narrowly by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

One of the leading Democratic prospects, State Senator Daylin Leach, suspended his bid in December, after he was accused of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching.


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Congressional leaders refuse to budge on shutdown’s first day, but negotiations continue

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Congressional leaders in both parties refused to budge publicly from their political corners Saturday on the first day of the government shutdown, avoiding direct negotiations and bitterly blaming each other for the impasse in speeches. President Trump joined the fray with a series of charged tweets.

But private glimmers of a breakthrough were evident by late Saturday, as moderate Democrats and Republicans began to rally behind a new short-term funding proposal to reopen the government through early February.

That plan could include funding for storm-ravaged states, reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program — and an implicit agreement to hold votes at some point in the coming weeks on a bipartisan immigration deal, according to senators involved in the discussions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed on the Senate floor late Saturday to take up a new spending plan by Monday morning, or sooner, that would keep government open through Feb. 8 but would not contain a solution for “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children.

“He wants to keep the government shut down until we finish a negotiation on the subject of illegal immigration,” McConnell said of his Democratic counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). McConnell repeated himself: “Shutting down government over illegal immigration.”

Everything you need to know about a government shutdown View Graphic Everything you need to know about a government shutdown

The moderate senators, meanwhile, are trying to reach a deal on immigration in hopes that, should a three-week spending accord be approved, McConnell would allow it to come up for a vote alongside a longer-term spending plan.

Democrats, however, remained intensely opposed to McConnell’s approach, unsure he would agree and frustrated by Republicans’ refusal to meet their demands on immigration while the government is closed. At issue for Democrats is the fate of thousands of young immigrants eligible for protection from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Trump canceled the program in September, and it is set to expire in March. Lawmakers are scrambling to enact a legislative solution.

Democrats also questioned the ability of the negotiating group to reach an agreement that can pass the Senate and House and also earn Trump’s approval.

“The conversation that needs to take place is the conversation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where the president of the United States brings in the four leaders from Congress,” said Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.). “We can come up with the best compromise in the world. The key is how to get it through the House and the way to do that is for the president to provide the air cover that he has not so far provided.”

Lawmakers in both chambers were scheduled to return to work Sunday afternoon.

McConnell and Schumer did little in public Saturday besides trade insults in brief speeches on the Senate floor or on television.

“Do you know what number CR this is? This has been going on for six months,” Schumer told CNN, using the legislative term for a short-term spending deal, a continuing resolution. “This is the fourth time. They can’t get it done and they just use these CRs.”

McConnell hunkered down in his office and played phone tag most of the day with Trump, updating him on where things stood and projecting an air of confidence that he was in a strong position, according to GOP senators.

There were no substantive talks between Schumer and McConnell. The real effort at bridging the divide was that bipartisan collection of roughly 20 senators from the less ideological wings of their respective caucuses. That group met and was trying to advance a deal that would open the government for three more weeks and set up a series of votes on competing immigration proposals. Still, several Senate Republicans said that McConnell was in no mood to give Schumer any assurances to open up the government.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) are leading the moderate group, with Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), both of whom have worked closely with Schumer on immigration issues in the past, serving as go-betweens for the two parties. The duo shuttled back and forth between Schumer’s and McConnell’s offices on the second floor of the Capitol trying to forge a political peace, but they left for dinner shortly after 6 p.m. with no solid agreement with either leader.

It is unclear whether there is enough bipartisan support for the immigration proposal being floated by the moderates — or for one that Senate conservatives are also drafting. And the possibility of no resolution to the immigration standoff before the DACA deadline remained.

So far, Trump, McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) have refused to consider Democrats’ demands until there is a bipartisan agreement to reopen the federal government.

“Senate Democrats shut down this government, and now Senate Democrats need to open this government back up,” Ryan said in a midday speech.

Trump, who spent the day at the White House, weighed in on Twitter: “Democrats are far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border. They could have easily made a deal but decided to play Shutdown politics instead. #WeNeedMoreRepublicansIn18 in order to power through mess!”

In a bid to move past the political squabbling, the moderate senators met for a second day in Collins’s office. She led a similar bipartisan group in working to resolve the last shutdown in 2013.

Moderates are “trying to find a pathway forward,” Manchin said.

Democratic leaders made their case for blaming Republicans for the shutdown. As thousands of women gathered along the Mall in Washington to protest Trump’s first year in office, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stood at the Capitol and pointed to a poster depicting a Trump tweet from last May calling for a “good shutdown.”

“Happy anniversary, Mr. President,” Pelosi said. “Your wish came true. You wanted the shutdown? The shutdown is all yours.”

Trump, who marked the first anniversary of his inauguration on Saturday, canceled plans to visit his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for a weekend of celebrations. His scheduled trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this coming week was also up in the air, according to an aide.

At the White House, a phone line for comments directed callers to voice mail with a message slamming Democrats. “Unfortunately, we cannot answer your call today because congressional Democrats are holding government funding, including funding for our troops and other national security priorities, hostage to an unrelated immigration debate. Due to this obstruction, the government is shut down,” a woman’s voice said on the message.

The White House said it supports the plan for funding through Feb. 8, eliminating a potentially significant hurdle to its enactment. Yet the simmering tensions between the Trump administration and Schumer, who said Saturday that negotiating with the president was like negotiating with “Jell-O,” underscored the delicacy of the moment.

Schumer and Trump had met privately on Friday afternoon, giving some lawmakers optimism that their deliberations would advance a deal to avoid a shutdown.

Schumer left the meeting buoyed, telling others that Trump seemed willing to strike a deal on a days-long funding extension in exchange for concessions such as border wall funding. But by midnight, he complained to his members that Trump had suddenly reneged on the possibility.

The White House told a different story. Briefing reporters at the White House on Saturday, budget director Mick Mulvaney disputed Schumer’s claim that he offered Trump his desired border wall funding during their meeting.

“Mr. Schumer has to up his game and be more honest with the president of the United States if we are going to be seeing progress,” Mulvaney said.

Schumer spokesman Matt House fired back on Twitter that Mulvaney, who was not present for the meeting, was “not telling the truth” about what happened.

Democrats pushed for a shutdown to spite Trump for his accomplishments, White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short argued to reporters.

“Their reaction is, ‘Because we can’t beat them, what we’re going to do is shut down the government,’ ” he said in a news briefing Saturday.

There was scattered and acrimonious activity on the House and Senate floors.

McConnell sought to bring up the four-week spending bill that failed Friday night; Democrats blocked the attempt. Democrats asked to vote on a bill guaranteeing federal workers their back pay for the period of the shutdown; McConnell objected, saying they deserve a full funding bill.

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee who objected to McConnell’s attempt to revive the short-term bill, questioned McConnell’s embrace of the GOP proposal to extend funding of the Children’s Health Insurance Program — and highlighted the discord that defined the day.

“He sounded like Marian Wright Edelman last night, the founder of the Children’s’ Defense Fund, with his newfound interest in the children’s health plan,” Wyden said in an interview. “It sounds like I’m listening to Ted Kennedy talk about health. . . . I’ve never heard of this being a priority [for Republicans].”

In the House, lawmakers prepared for a possible deal by debating a special rule allowing them to consider any bill that passes the Senate on the same day. The debate devolved into a shouting match over displaying disparaging photos of other members — such as Schumer — on the floor.

Elise Viebeck and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

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Supreme Court to Consider Challenge to Trump’s Latest Travel Ban

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The restrictions vary in their details, but for the most part, citizens of the countries are forbidden from emigrating to the United States and many of them are barred from working, studying or vacationing here.

In December, in a sign that the Supreme Court may be more receptive to upholding the September order, the court allowed it to go into effect as the case moved forward. The move effectively overturned a compromise in place since June, when the court said travelers with connections to the United States could continue to travel here notwithstanding restrictions in an earlier version of the ban.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the December ruling.

Hawaii, several individuals and a Muslim group challenged the latest ban’s limits on travel from six predominantly Muslim nations; they did not object to the portions concerning North Korea and Venezuela. They prevailed before a Federal District Court there and before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.

The appeals court ruled that Mr. Trump had exceeded the authority Congress had given him over immigration and had violated a part of the immigration laws barring discrimination in the issuance of visas.

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In his brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote that the president has vast constitutional and statutory authority over immigration. He added that the third order had been the result of “an extensive, worldwide review by multiple government agencies.”

“The courts below,” Mr. Francisco wrote, “have overridden the president’s judgments on sensitive matters of national security and foreign relations, and severely restricted the ability of this and future presidents to protect the nation.”

The appeals court based its ruling on immigration statutes, not the Constitution’s prohibition of religious discrimination. But both sides urged the Supreme Court to consider both the statutory and constitutional questions if it agreed to hear the case.

Lawyers for the challengers told the justices that Mr. Trump’s own statements provided powerful evidence of anti-Muslim animus. The latest order, they said, was infected by the same flaws as the previous one.

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“The president has repeatedly explained that the two orders pursue the same aim,” the challengers wrote. Nine days before the September order was released, they wrote, “the president demanded a ‘larger, tougher and more specific’ ban, reminding the public that he remains committed to a ‘travel ban’ even if it is not ‘politically correct.’”

On the day the September order became public, the challengers added, “the president made clear that it was the harsher version of the travel ban, telling reporters, ‘The travel ban: the tougher, the better.’”

Mr. Francisco said discrimination had played no role in the September order. “The proclamation’s process and substance confirm that its purpose was to achieve national-security and foreign-policy goals, not to impose anti-Muslim bias,” Mr. Francisco wrote.

The Supreme Court, back at full strength after Mr. Trump’s appointment of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, already had an unusually large number of significant cases on its docket, including ones on voting rights, union power, digital privacy and a clash between claims of religious freedom and gay rights.


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Tom Petty died of an accidental drug overdose. His family shared the news to ‘save lives.’

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Tom Petty died in October 2017 from an accidental drug overdose as a result of mixing medications, his family announced on Jan. 19, 2018. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for J/P HRO)

Tom Petty, the singer and guitarist whose influential music spanned four decades, died in October from an accidental drug overdose as a result of mixing medications involving opioids, his family announced Friday.

A Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner’s report reveals that Petty had traces of multiple opioids including fentanyl in his system when he died at age 66 after being found unconscious at his home in Malibu, Calif. He had suffered cardiac arrest.

The cause of his death had until Friday remained a mystery. For months, his fans wondered what killed Petty after his death certificate, released about a week later, registered the cause of death as “deferred” pending an autopsy. He died a week after concluding a nationwide tour with his band, the Heartbreakers. He told Rolling Stone at the time that the tour might be his last. “I don’t want to spend my life on the road,” he said.

Petty’s wife, Dana Petty, and his daughter, Adria Petty, wrote in a statement posted to the band’s website and Facebook page that Petty had suffered from emphysema, knee problems and a fractured hip. Out of commitment to his fans, he toured for 53 dates with the fractured hip. But the pain soon became unbearable and led Petty to turn to medication, the family said.

“We knew before the report was shared with us that he was prescribed various pain medications for a multitude of issues including Fentanyl patches and we feel confident that this was, as the coroner found, an unfortunate accident,” the family wrote.

Our family sat together this morning with the Medical Examiner – Coroner’s office and we were informed of their final…

Posted by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on Friday, January 19, 2018

The family shared the coroner’s report to “spark a further discussion on the opioid crisis.”

“We hope in some way this report can save lives,” the family wrote.

Fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic about 50 times stronger than heroin, is linked to thousands of overdoses and fatalities across the country. Fentanyl-related deaths increased nearly 600 percent from 2014 to 2016 in 24 of the nation’s biggest cities, according to health departments. A report by The Washington Post last year showed 582 fatal overdoses from fentanyl in 2014, followed by a surge to 3,946 such deaths in 2016.

[Tom Petty was a heroin addict in the ’90s. Here’s why he’s finally talking about it.]

Petty in 2015 opened up about his addiction to heroin in the 1990s. Petty for decades had kept the addiction a secret and, before talking about it to biographer Warren Zanes, told him: “I am very concerned that talking about this is putting a bad example out there for young people. If anyone is going to think heroin is an option because they know my story of using heroin, I can’t do this.”

“I think you’re going to come off as a cautionary tale rather than a romantic tale,” Zanes recalled telling Petty, according to The Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers.

Prince in 2016 also died from a fentanyl overdose a week after the pop singer’s plane made an emergency stop in Moline, Ill., for him to receive medical treatment as he was returning from an Atlanta concert.

Petty broke into the rock-and-roll scene with the Heartbreakers in the 1970s with songs that included “Free Fallin’,” “I Won’t Back Down” and “American Girl.”

His family said they were proud Petty could still perform those songs for his fans on his 40th anniversary tour last year.

“We now know for certain he went painlessly and beautifully exhausted after doing what he loved the most, for one last time, performing live with his unmatchable rock band for his loyal fans on the biggest tour of his 40 plus year career,” Petty’s family wrote.

Read more:

Perspective: Tom Petty’s Americana felt stranger than the rest

Perspective: Tom Petty The Heartbreakers, ‘American Girl’: The Week In One Song

These were Tom Petty’s best songs

The most comprehensive look yet at how the Las Vegas concert massacre unfolded

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In an 81-page investigative report released Friday, Las Vegas police gave their most comprehensive timeline to date on how the Oct. 1 massacre unfolded at a country music concert on the Strip.

The report did not give any greater insight into why gunman Stephen Paddock, an amateur gambler, opened fire on thousands of people from his room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, killing 58 people before killing himself.

Nor was it likely to settle questions about why police arrived on the 32nd floor, where Paddock was perched, only after he had stopped shooting.

But investigators’ findings gave a little more detail on what police know about Paddock’s activities before and during the shooting — important because of lingering questions about how Paddock’s preparations had gone unnoticed, and why it took so long for his deadly shooting spree to end.

Hundreds of journals found in home with 13 captive children

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A child psychiatrist tells AP that the 13 malnourished children found in captivity in California haven’t experienced the milestones that most kids need in order to be successful. He says they face years of rehabilitation to overcome the trauma they’ve experienced. (Jan. 18)
AP

PERRIS, Calif. — The children weren’t allowed to eat. They weren’t allowed to bathe.

They couldn’t play with toys that were kept in the closet, still packaged. They couldn’t go outside. They couldn’t escape.

Their depraved parents allowed them to do only one thing, prosecutors said.

They could write.

On Sunday, Riverside County law enforcement discovered 13 siblings — ages 2 to 29 — imprisoned in the an unassuming four-bedroom, three-bathroom suburban home. A teenage captive had escaped through a window and called for help, revealing a crime that has horrified and captivated the nation.

► Jan. 19: A California couple did these things to their own kids, police say
► Jan. 19: DA decries ‘human depravity,’ says kids beaten, starved for months
► Jan. 18: 13 malnourished kids were chained to furniture, taunted with food

The children’s parents, David and Louise Turpin, now face life in prison for multiple counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment that lasted for years. While describing the case Thursday, prosecutors revealed the Turpin children’s only freedom was writing in journals.

Authorities have recovered hundreds of them.

Riverside County law enforcement officials now are combing through those journals. District Attorney Mike Hestrin said he believes they will be very significant to the coming court case and will provide “strong evidence of what occurred in that home.”

The diaries also have sparked the interest of academics who research trauma and language. Writing in the journals was, quite possibly, what allowed the children to survive a life of fear, hunger and torture, said James Pennebaker, a renowned expert on using writing to heal from traumatic experiences.

“There is a good chance that being able to write may have kept them sane,” Pennebaker said. “In an interesting way, this may have helped them come to terms with the bizarre world they lived in.”

Pennebaker, a University of Texas-Austin psychology professor who has been following the Perris case from afar, described the child torture as the “most horrific story imaginable.” In an interview Friday, he wondered aloud why the Turpins would have allowed their children to chronicle their captivity and still kept the journals in the house, basically stockpiling evidence of their crimes.

But the unlikely existence of these journals creates a unique research tool that may allow academics to design therapies to help victims of torture, maltreatment and prolonged captivity, Pennbaker said.

The children’s stunted language skills might make the journals hard to decipher, he said. But this challenge also would be valuable in the study of communications barriers and the evolution of language.

► Jan. 17: ‘Not one person called us’ about odd behavior, official says
► Jan. 17: Woman accused of torturing kids ‘shut us out,’ sister says

From a research perspective, the only writings that could even loosely compare to the children’s journals would come from prison inmates or the famous diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who chronicled her life as she hid from the Nazis during World War II, Pennebaker said.

“Anne Frank lived in an insane world, but her family life was remarkably normal,” Pennebaker said. “This is the exact opposite.”

Research into the journals likely will have to wait until the Turpins’ criminal case is resolved, and only if the writings are released to academics, Pennebaker said.

In the meantime, the journals will also have tremendous value for the criminal investigation, even though they may not be admissable as evidence in a courtroom, said Laurie Levenson, a criminal law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Investigators who are attempting to interview the children, a delicate process, could start with the journals, asking about entries that imply abuse, Levenson said. Additionally, if either of the parents were to testify in their own defense, prosecutors could use the journals to cross-examine them. 

And finally, if any of the children testify, they could use the journals to refresh their memory on witness stand, much the way a police officer reviews a report before testifying about an old crime, she said.

“You can’t cross examine a journal, you have to cross examine the children, but they are a still a good starting point,” Levenson said. “And frankly, they may be enough to persuade a defendant that they don’t want to go through a long trial here.”

The Turpins are accused of starving their children to the point of dramatically stunting their growth, beating them and strangling them. Sometimes they were chained for months at a time as punishment, Hestrin said.

► Jan. 16: Police: Teen’s ‘courage’ led officers to tortured, starved children
► Jan. 15: Calif. couple charged with abuse for starving, chaining their children

California criminal charges stemmed from crimes dating to 2010, he said. But authorities believe the children’s abuse began in Texas.

The Turpin family had lived in Fort Worth and Rio Vista, Texas, before moving to Murrieta, Calif. They moved into their Perris home, about 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles, in August 2014.

“I will tell you as a prosecutor, there are cases that stick with you. They haunt you,” Hestrin said. “Sometimes in this business we are faced with human depravity. That is what we are looking at here.”

David and Louise Turpin pleaded not guilty to charges during a brief hearing Thursday. Their lawyers declined to comment as they left courtroom, saying they were unwilling or not yet ready to discuss the case publicly.

Follow Brett Kelman on Twitter: @TDSbrettkelman

Trump gets mixed reviews from March for Life antiabortion protesters

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Thousands of activists at the annual March for Life enjoyed a rare display of political firepower Friday, with addresses by the president, vice president and House speaker all celebrating gains the antiabortion movement has made under Donald Trump. But the movement’s elevated status comes at the price of much internal debate.

“Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, in a speech that was broadcast to the marchers gathered near the Washington Monument.

The march — which typically draws busloads of Catholic school students, a large contingent of evangelical Christians and poster-toting protesters of many persuasions — falls each year around the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a legal right to abortion, and it intends to pressure Congress and the White House to limit legal access to the procedure.

Trump said he was “really proud to be the first president to stand with you here at the White House”; Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush addressed the march by telephone when they were in office.

[‘Badass. Prolife. Feminist.’ How some women are bridging the March for Life and the Women’s March.]

Megan Ensor, who came from Atlanta to attend her first March for Life, expressed her enthusiasm that Trump took the time to speak to the marchers. “When it comes to the greatest moral evil of our time, the question that is most important is that he cares. . . . When he comes today, that’s a good thing. We don’t have to agree with him on everything,” she said.

Anna Rose Riccard, 25, works for antiabortion organizations and called the president’s appearance not a boon but an “unfortunate distraction.” Riccard, of Alexandria, said she doesn’t believe the antiabortion cause is a priority for Trump, and she saw fellow Catholics disagreeing on social media about his appearance.

“I give him credit for appointing a conservative justice,” she said, referring to Neil M. Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.

Trump, however, touted his administration’s antiabortion policies, including new orders on Thursday and Friday establishing an office to support medical professionals who do not want to perform abortions and making it easier for states to direct funding away from Planned Parenthood.

[Trump will address the March for Life. Here’s what abortion opponents want.]

Most leaders of the antiabortion movement don’t blame Trump for what they perceive as a lack of progress; they fault Republicans in Congress for inaction.

“It’s because of the Senate. I put the blame with the Senate,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said in an interview last week. “I think that some of our members of Congress are afraid to be courageous on these issues.”

Though Trump said Friday that “Americans are more and more pro-life; you see that all the time,” views on abortion have remained quite steady for decades. Since the mid-1990s, about half of citizens, give or take a few percentage points, have said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40-odd percent have said it should be illegal in all or most cases.

[‘If they come for you, they come for me’: A priest faces deportation — and a divided church]

Last year, the March for Life fell just days after Trump’s inauguration, and the tone was ebullient. Marchers believed they were heralding an administration that would prioritize limiting abortion. Mancini said then that she had four goals for policy in the president’s first year in office: appointing an apparently antiabortion Supreme Court justice, defunding Planned Parenthood, codifying the annual Hyde Amendment that restricts federal money from funding abortions and passing a law banning abortion in many cases after 20 weeks.

A year later, only the first of those four goals has been accomplished.

Bills to make the Hyde Amendment permanent and to ban certain late-term abortions passed in the House but are unlikely to pass the Senate. Both chambers of Congress tried to defund Planned Parenthood in their unsuccessful efforts to pass a health-care bill.

Even abortion rights supporters are surprised that antiabortion policies haven’t made more headway in the past year.

“I think it goes to show how the Republicans just didn’t have a plan, in many ways,” said Heather Boonstra, director of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute.

[Sexual abuse case against the Mormon Church begins in West Virginia]

The White House has advanced several policies through executive orders rather than legislation, starting with an expanded version of the Bush-era Mexico City policy, which bars U.S. funding to public health organizations that promote abortion overseas and which Trump reinstated upon taking office. On Thursday, the day before the march, Trump announced another policy that pleased antiabortion activists — a new office meant to protect the rights of medical professionals who don’t want to participate in abortions because of their religious beliefs.

In his speech Friday, Trump noted those actions, and boasted about the stock market and unemployment rates as well. He called to the podium a mother who became pregnant at 17 and later went on to help establish a facility to support homeless pregnant women.

Trump repeated a claim he made during a presidential debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016 — that a fetus in “a number of states” can be aborted “in the ninth month.”

“It is wrong. It has to change,” he said about those late-term abortions. As the Post’s Fact Checker pointed out in 2016, 89 percent of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks and only 1.2 percent occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute. All but seven states prohibit some abortions after a certain point in pregnancy, making “ninth month” abortions exceptionally rare and largely banned already.

[HHS releases new rule on health workers’ religious, moral objections]

Vice President Pence mentioned the Roe v. Wade anniversary, saying, “Forty-five years ago, the Supreme Court turned its back on the inalienable right to life. But in that moment, our movement began.” He praised Trump as “the most pro-life president in American history” and vowed, “With God’s help, we will restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”

At the marchers’ noon rally east of the Washington Monument, the White House satellite appearance was part of a slate of speakers, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

The crowd gave him rock star treatment, with whoops and applause. “How grateful are we to have a pro-life president back in the White House!” Ryan said.

“One thing that gets lost is how compassionate the pro-life movement is,” he said. “To help women who have gone through the pain of abortion, to help single mothers, to give them resources through thousands of pregnancy centers: This is the face of the pro-life movement.”

Ahead of the march, antiabortion groups around the region hosted events on Friday morning – huge youth Masses full of screaming teenagers, a meeting on legal strategies to limit abortion and a conference in the basement of a downtown hotel where the emphasis was on expanding the idea of “pro-life.”

Hundreds of people at the Evangelicals for Life conference wandered booths about prison ministries and health care and heard speakers talk about the importance of adoption and serving refugees.

Popular evangelical author and speaker Ann Voskamp talked to a crowd of largely young white listeners about a “robust pro-life ethic. … We are for both humans in utero and humans in crisis. This is us.”

The message echoed a talk on Capitol Hill Thursday, in which the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, one of Trump’s evangelical advisers, stood with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urging Congress to protect undocumented young adults. Noting that the March for Life would be the next day, Rodriguez said the two topics were linked as “life” issues.

Jessica Ponce, 26, marched at the very front of the pack with fellow parishioners from the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala. She said the experience is poignant because she just learned she is pregnant. A native Mexican who is now a permanent resident in the United States, she said that to her, “pro-life” means taking care of all human beings, including immigrants and refugees.

“It’s not possible to care for people if you are separating families, and parents cannot defend the lives of their children if they are not able to stay together,” she said.

In an effort to make the same point, a group of Franciscan priests stood near the front of the stage during the rally. When Trump appeared on the screen, they raised banners saying: “Keeping families together is pro-life! Keep God’s dream alive!”

“I’m here to stand for the integrity of my faith and of the gospel. I’m not willing to sacrifice that for political expediency,” said the Rev. Jacek Orzechowski, a community organizer with Catholic Charities of Washington. “For someone to say they’re pro-life but display callous policies that tear families apart is reprehensible.”

A Catholic priest from New York City said some in his parish – a heavily Central American congregation that includes many undocumented immigrants – didn’t come to Washington out of fear. The priest, who said he was afraid to use his name, still praised Trump’s talk at the rally. “We put our faith in no man. Our faith is in Jesus.”

About 50 demonstrators staged their own rally outside the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum rather than joining the main rally on the Mall, to protest Trump’s address. They said their belief that life begins at conception comes from scientific research on fetal development, not from faith. They brought “I am a pro-life feminist” signs that they hoped would indicate that the antiabortion movement is not just “a bunch of priests,” as Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa put it.

“Let’s put some secular, pro-life, bad-ass feminists up front,” she said.

Many leaders of the movement, though, publicly embrace Trump to greater or lesser extent. Mancini said she thinks the marchers, most of them young because of the prevalence of school groups in attendance, telegraphed a message of support to the president. “For Trump, hopefully, he feels thanked and strengthened for his perspective,” she said.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey contributed to this report. This post has been updated.

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Trump’s evangelical advisers meet with Pelosi about a deal for ‘dreamers’

Pope Francis just performed a historic wedding aboard the papal plane

An anonymous donor gave everyone in church $100 — and watched 100 good deeds unfold

Government shuts down after Senate bill collapses, negotiations fail

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The federal government shut down for the first time in more than four years Friday after senators rejected a temporary spending patch and bipartisan efforts to find an alternative fell short as a midnight deadline came and went.

Republican and Democratic leaders both said they would continue to talk, raising the possibility of a solution over the weekend. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Friday that the conflict has a “really good chance” of being resolved before government offices open Monday, suggesting that a shutdown’s impacts could be limited.

But the White House drew a hard line immediately after midnight, saying they would not negotiate over a central issue — immigration — until government funding is restored.

“We will not negotiate the status of unlawful immigrants while Democrats hold our lawful citizens hostage over their reckless demands,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement. “This is the behavior of obstructionist losers, not legislators. When Democrats start paying our armed forces and first responders we will reopen negotiations on immigration reform.”

View Graphic Everything you need to know about a government shutdown

Both parties confronted major political risks with 10 months to go until the midterm elections. Republicans resolved not to submit to the minority party’s demands to negotiate, while Democrats largely unified to use the shutdown deadline to force concessions on numerous issues — including protections for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants.

The standoff culminated in a late-night Senate vote that failed to clear a 60-vote hurdle, sending congressional leaders and President Trump back to the starting line after days of political posturing on all sides.

“A government shutdown was 100 percent avoidable. Completely avoidable. Now it is imminent,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor following the vote. “Perhaps across the aisle some of our Democratic colleagues are feeling proud of themselves, but what has their filibuster accomplished? . . . The answer is simple: Their very own government shutdown.”

[More blame Republicans than Democrats for potential government shutdown, Post-ABC poll finds]

The early contours of the blame game appeared to cut against Trump and the Republicans, who control all levers of government but cannot pass major legislation without at least partial support from Senate Democrats. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, Americans said by a 20-point margin that they would blame a shutdown on Trump and the GOP rather than Democrats.

A government shutdown causing employee furloughs has never occurred under unified party control of Congress and the White House. Some furloughs of White House employees began immediately early Saturday.

The midnight drama came after an unusually tranquil day inside the Capitol, where visible tensions remained at a low simmer as various parties undertook quiet talks to discuss ways to avoid the shutdown.

Republicans started the day eager to show a united front: House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and McConnell met Friday morning, determined to hold firm to a strategy they had crafted nearly a week prior: Make Democrats an offer they could not refuse by attaching a long-term extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, as well as the delay of some unpopular health-care taxes. And if they did refuse, the leaders believed, the public backlash would be intense — particularly in states where vulnerable Democratic senators are seeking reelection in November.

McConnell delivered a morning salvo on the Senate floor, declaring that Democrats had been led into a “box canyon” by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

But by midday, McConnell’s strategy threatened to be upended by Trump — who phoned Schumer and invited him to the White House for a private meeting with no other congressional leaders.

That immediately raised Republicans’ suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump might be tempted to cut a deal with his fellow New Yorker — much as he did in the early stages of a September standoff — that would undercut the GOP negotiating strategy and produce a deal that congressional conservatives could not stomach.

White House aides assured top congressional leaders that no deal would emerge from the meeting, that it was merely meant to gauge the posture of Schumer and the Democrats. Republicans exhaled when that turned out to be so.

Trump and Schumer talked over a cheeseburger lunch, according to a person familiar with their conversations, covering a wide range of contentious issues. Later on the Senate floor, Schumer described a meeting where he forged outlines of a potential deal with Trump, only to see it fall apart once he left the room.

“I reluctantly put the border wall on the table for discussion — even that was not enough to entice the president to finish the deal,” he said, adding: “What has transpired since that meeting in the Oval Office is indicative of the entire tumultuous and chaotic process Republicans have engaged in in the negotiations thus far. Even though President Trump seemed to like an outline of a deal in the room, he did not press his party in Congress to accept it.”

[Who is sent home during a shutdown?]

What ensued for the remainder of the afternoon was a silent standoff, as it became increasingly clear that Republicans would not be able to lure enough Democrats to pass their preferred funding patch.

For a few Democratic senators, a vote to spark a shutdown was too tough to swallow — even for Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, who faced his first major political dilemma since winning a December special election in a campaign that emphasized his support for CHIP.

“I have made a strong commitment in my state to 150,000 children who need health insurance,” he said, announcing his decision to reporters late Friday.

He joined Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), all of whom face tough paths to reelection in states that supported Trump in 2016 and voted to keep the government open.

But Michigan Sens. Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow, meanwhile, announced they would both vote against the measure, bolstering the margin opposed to the bill. Four Republicans were also opposed: Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

Republicans spent much of the day attacking Democrats on several fronts — most frequently by pointing to a litany of critical statements Democratic leaders, including Schumer, had made slamming Republicans ahead of the 2013 shutdown.

In a 2013 ABC News interview, Schumer said, “You know we could do the same thing on immigration . . . We could say, ‘We’re shutting down the government. We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling until you pass immigration reform.’ It would be governmental chaos.”

“I think the longer it goes on, the more the American people see the hypocrisy on the Democratic side,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a veteran of several shutdown dramas.

Democrats, meanwhile, pointed to other parts of the historical record — notably, a Trump tweet from May: “Our country needs a good “shutdown” in September to fix mess!”

Conservatives enthusiastically promoted the notion that Democrats were taking the government to the cusp of a shutdown to benefit undocumented immigrants, even a largely sympathetic subset. Democrats want legal status for “dreamers” — young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children who now live here illegally — in return for a spending agreement. That fight was prompted by Trump’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is expected to take effect in March barring court challenges.

Numerous Republicans said they were perfectly comfortable waging the shutdown fight on those terms, though Democrats have sought to expand the playing field to other issues such as funding to combat opioid abuse and pension bailouts.

“Are Democrats going to shut the government . . . because we want basic reforms and enforcement measures that are going to prevent further flows of illegal immigrants and unskilled immigrants?” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is pushing for hard-line immigration policies in return for a DACA fix. “Seems to me like a tough position to win in light of the 2016 election.”

Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, said that the effort by Democrats to put an immigration fix in the spending bill was unreasonable, given that legislative text has not been drafted and the program doesn’t expire until March.

“There’s no DACA bill to vote on, and there’s no emergency on the timing,” Short said.

The posturing took place mainly in front of reporters. Missing were the furious back-and-forth negotiations that preceded the 16-day shutdown in 2013, when Republican leaders sought to force a rollback of the Affordable Care Act and met several times with President Obama to seek an accommodation.

Shortly after 6 p.m., Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) looked at his watch and vented frustration.

“Government shuts down in what, five hours and 40 minutes? And there’s no solution? I don’t know whether Senator Schumer is just determined to take it down,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t want to shut the government down, either, but they seem to be determined to do so.”

Visibly, only Graham shuttled back and forth between the Republican and Democratic leadership offices, shopping a proposal to replace the four-week funding extension passed by the House with a slightly shorter one.

As the 10 p.m. vote approached, Cornyn declared: “No deal.”

Schumer rejected a proposal that would have extended funding by three weeks, to Feb. 8, instead of four. Schumer floated a 10-day extension, which would have set another deadline just before Trump delivered his State of the Union address on Jan. 30. Shortly after midnight, McConnell closed the vote and declared an impasse.

The Trump administration worked up plans to keep national parks and monuments open despite a shutdown as a way to blunt public anger, and while the military would not cease to operate, troops would not be paid unless Congress specifically authorizes it.

[Trump may put off Mar-a-Lago trip until bill passes]

In a sign of the preparations on Capitol Hill, congressional staffers received formal notice Friday morning that they may be furloughed starting at midnight. Individual lawmakers will have to determine which aides must report for work during the impasse.

Trump postponed a scheduled trip to his Florida resort, where he had scheduled a pricey fundraiser to mark his first anniversary in office. Ryan faced the cancellation of an official trip to Iraq, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other lawmakers revisited plans to travel to Switzerland for the World Economic Forum.

The latter trip drove Democratic attacks earlier in the day, especially after McCarthy floated plans in the morning to send House members home for a planned week-long recess.

“They want to spend next week hobnobbing with their elitist friends instead of honoring their responsibilities to the American people,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) said of Republicans.

Earlier in the night, around 150 protesters gathered outside the Capitol to hear Democrats promise not to back any spending deal that did not grant legal status to DACA recipients.

“This is a movement,” said Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). “We’re going to have some good days, and we’re going to have some bad days. And like every movement that has allowed our country to progress, we are going to have to fight.”

Sean Sullivan and John Wagner contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost