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By Thomas Kaplan

Dec. 21, 2017

WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Thursday to legislation to keep the government funded into January, averting a government shutdown this weekend but kicking fights over issues like immigration, surveillance and health care into the new year.

The stopgap spending bill extends government funding until Jan. 19 while also providing a short-term funding fix for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, whose financing lapsed at the end of September.

After the House and Senate succeeded in passing a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul this week, the stopgap bill includes language to prevent automatic spending cuts that would be required to offset the tax bill’s effect on the deficit.

The House passed the bill 231 to 188, with most Republicans voting for it and most Democrats opposing it. The Senate later gave its approval, as well, in a 66-to-32 vote.

The extension of government funding saves Republicans from what would have been a colossal embarrassment just after they celebrated passage of the biggest tax rewrite in decades. But the lack of a resolution to several pressing issues leaves lawmakers facing a tough task when they return after the holidays, with the possibility of a high-stakes showdown when the next government funding deadline approaches.

“I guess we better recharge our batteries,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican. “It seems like Groundhog Day. We get up and do the same thing over and over and over again. It’s maddening.”

Separately, the House voted Thursday to approve $81 billion in additional disaster aid in response to this year’s hurricanes and wildfires. But the Senate does not plan to take action on the aid package until the new year.

The failure to resolve so many issues left bruised feelings in both parties. Promised bills to shield young immigrants from deportation, extend a surveillance program, bolster the military and stabilize health insurance markets were all left for another day.

Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, declared the stopgap bill to be an “epic failure of governing.”

But the disappointment was not enough to keep Congress away from its holiday break.

Lawmakers needed to take action because government funding was set to lapse at the end of Friday, though as Thursday began, it was unclear whether Republican leaders would be able to find the votes they needed to avert a crisis.

President Trump weighed in on Twitter in the morning, accusing House Democrats of wanting a government shutdown in order to take attention away from the tax overhaul.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/943856675294982145

Representative Alcee L. Hastings, Democrat of Florida, read Mr. Trump’s tweet aloud at a House committee meeting and said that he knew no Democrat or Republican who wants to shut the government down. Mr. Trump, he said, needs to put his Twitter account “under his pillow and sleep on it rather than continue to divide this country the way that he has.”

On Capitol Hill, the big question was whether enough Republicans would support the stopgap spending bill in the House in order to pass it.

Many Republicans in the House have grown impatient as they seek to raise military spending. An earlier stopgap bill would have included long-term funding for the Defense Department, but Republicans ended up backing away from that approach, which would not have been able to get through the Senate. The stopgap bill does include funds for missile defense and for repairs to two Navy destroyers involved in collisions this year.

House Democrats showed little willingness to support a stopgap measure as they push for other priorities, including securing a deal to shield from deportation young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. Such “Dreamers” will have to wait until at least January for action on that issue.

“All of us as members of Congress, we’re eager to return to our families as soon as possible back across America,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. “But our Dreamers are left with fear and uncertainty about returning to their families and about their future.”

Democrats complained that Congress was lurching from one crisis to the next, with a stack of big issues still unresolved, including a long-term spending deal.

“We shouldn’t be funding the government week to week, month to month, but yet my Republican friends have ended up doing just that,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They can’t seem to get their act together.”

The stopgap bill provides money for CHIP and community health centers through March. And it directs the secretary of health and human services to distribute leftover CHIP funds to states with the most urgent financial problems so they do not have to shut down the program.

But the $2.85 billion provided for CHIP is far less than the five years of funds that congressional leaders had promised, and it is unclear whether those funds will be adequate. Some states had already begun to inform parents that their children could lose coverage early next year if Congress did not act. The bill does not provide the certainty that state officials had been seeking.

“I do not think this is anywhere close to enough money,” said Bruce Lesley, the president of First Focus, a child advocacy group. “For a $12 billion to $14 billion program, this provides less than $3 billion for what is effectively six months” — the first half of the 2018 fiscal year, which began in October.

Leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate support legislation to provide five years of funds for CHIP, but they have been unable to agree on how to pay for it. The standoff over CHIP is remarkable because the program has had strong bipartisan support since it was created 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was president and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

It also comes after the Republicans passed the $1.5 trillion tax measure with little effort to pay for it.

The stopgap bill also extends through Jan. 19 a statute that provides the legal basis for the National Security Agency and F.B.I.’s warrantless surveillance program, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is set to expire on Dec. 31. Congress will have to return to the issue of whether to impose new privacy safeguards on that program as part of a longer-term extension.

The bill also includes $2.1 billion to prop up the Veterans Choice program, which pays for veterans facing barriers to care within the government’s health system to get outside help. Lawmakers have been trying for months — thus far, unsuccessfully — to reach an agreement to permanently overhaul and fund the program, and a funding extension would buy them more time.

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President TrumpDonald John TrumpHouse Democrat slams Donald Trump Jr. for ‘serious case of amnesia’ after testimony Skier Lindsey Vonn: I don’t want to represent Trump at Olympics Poll: 4 in 10 Republicans think senior Trump advisers had improper dealings with Russia MORE on Wednesday issued his first commuted sentence for a federal prisoner, freeing Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of the country’s largest kosher meat-processing plant who in 2009 was sentenced to 27 years in prison for a litany of financial crimes.

The commutation had bipartisan support from lawmakers and had become a cause among many leading voices in the legal community, petitioning the Obama and Trump administrations to draw attention to a sentence they said was wildly disproportionate to the crime that had been committed.

Rubashkin, a father of 10, will have served eight years of his sentence. The commutation is not a presidential pardon — Rubashkin’s conviction will stand, as will his terms of release and the restitution payments he will be obliged to pay.

Still, the commutation will clear Rubashkin of the remaining 19 years of a sentence that had been condemned by politicians on the left and the right as cruel and unusual. 

“The President’s review of Mr. Rubashkin’s case and commutation decision were based on expressions of support from Members of Congress and a broad cross-section of the legal community,” the White House said in a statement. 

“A bipartisan group of more than 100 former high-ranking and distinguished Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars have expressed concerns about the evidentiary proceedings in Mr. Rubashkin’s case and the severity of his sentence. Additionally, more than 30 current Members of Congress have written letters expressing support for review of Mr. Rubashkin’s case.”

Rubashkin was the CEO of a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, the largest in the country. Federal law enforcement raided the company in November 2008 and Rubashkin was found guilty of bank fraud and money laundering. Hundreds of Rubashkin’s employees were arrested for working in the country illegally.

Scores of the country’s leading legal experts, including four attorneys general, wrote to Trump earlier this year asking that Rubaskin’s sentence be commuted, arguing that the 27-year sentence was excessive because he was a first-time, non-violent offender.

“Essentially, Mr. Rubashkin was convicted of fraud offenses stemming from inflating collateral to obtain a higher line of credit for Agriprocessors, his father’s kosher meat business, and for paying some cattle owners 11 days late,” the lawyers wrote.

“Mr. Rubashkin is a devoted husband and father, a deeply religious man who simply  doesn’t deserve a sentence of this length, or anything remotely close to it,” the letter continued. “Indeed, his sentence is far longer than the median sentences for murder, kidnapping, sexual abuse, child pornography and numerous other offenses exponentially more serious than his.”

This is the first time Trump has used the executive power to commute a federal prisoner’s sentence, although earlier this year he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.

Arpaio had been convicted of criminal contempt for disobeying a Justice Department edict against racially profiling Latinos.

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By Gerry Mullany

Dec. 20, 2017

HONG KONG — A North Korean soldier defected to South Korea on Thursday through the heavily guarded demilitarized zone separating the two countries, leading to gunfire on both sides of the border, the South Korean military said.

The “low ranking” soldier was manning a guard post along the DMZ when he fled through thick fog, the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

The escape follows a similar one last month, in which another North Korean soldier was shot by his colleagues as he successfully fled his DMZ posting.

In that case, South Korean border guards who heard the gunshots found the soldier 55 yards from the border line that bisects Panmunjom, the so-called truce village in the Joint Security Area, and carried him to safety. Doctors later found dozens of parasitic worms in his digestive system, some as long as 11 inches, which officials said was a sign of the poor hygiene and nutrition afflicting North Korea.

Officials said the soldier who fled Thursday was not fired upon. South Korean soldiers later fired 20 warning shots at North Korean border guards who were searching for the defector, which was followed 40 minutes later by gunfire in the North, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea since a famine killed at least a million people in the North in the 1990s. The country has recently been the subject of a tightening grip of sanctions that have curbed exports that provide urgently needed revenue, and it has been struggling with the impact of a drought that has reduced agricultural yields.

But it is extremely rare for people to flee across the demilitarized zone. The 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, considered the most heavily fortified border in the world, is guarded by minefields, sentry posts and tall fences topped with barbed wire, some electrified.

The soldier’s defection to South Korea on Thursday was the fourth this year, and the gunfire over the episode is certain to raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula just as hopes have grown for a thaw in relations between the South and North.

South Korean officials have recently held out the possibility that they might be willing to push back the timing of planned joint military exercises with the United States to reduce tensions.

Those exercises have traditionally drawn a fierce response from North Korea, which sees them as a preparation for military action against the North.

On Tuesday, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, told NBC News that he was open to curtailing the exercises ahead of next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February.

“It is possible for South Korea and the U.S. to review the possibility of postponing the exercises,” he said. “I’ve made such a suggestion to the U.S., and the U.S. is currently reviewing it. However, all this depends on how North Korea behaves.”

China and Russia have proposed a “freeze for freeze” agreement in which North Korea would halt its nuclear and missile tests in return for a halt to the military exercises.

But on Wednesday, the Pentagon distanced itself from Mr. Moon’s suggestion about delaying the exercises.

“The United States and our allies and partners in the region have long conducted routine exercises to maintain readiness,” Lt. Col. Chris Logan, a Defense Department spokesman, told Yonhap. “But it would be inappropriate to discuss plans for future exercises at this time.”

In a possible sign of worsening conditions in the North, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said that 15 North Koreans, including the four soldiers, had fled directly to South Korea this year, compared with five people, including one soldier, last year. Most defectors avoid such a perilous crossing to the South, instead fleeing through China.

Follow Gerry Mullany on Twitter: @gerrymullany.

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It is not clear whether Mr. Trump is going to sign the bill before the end of the year. Republicans need to work with Democrats to avert automatic spending cuts that could be set off as a result of the tax bill adding to the deficit. They need support from Democrats to avoid these spending cuts, and if they wait until next year, it will buy them extra time to reach such a deal. Republicans in Congress were struggling to reach an agreement that would keep the government funded into January and avoid a shutdown.

At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump presided over a grand celebration on the South Portico, flanked by Republican lawmakers and members of his cabinet in a show of unity. A Marine Band played Christmas carols while the president and his party soaked up a moment long in coming.

“This will indeed be a very big day, when people look back at our country. It’s a whole different attitude, a whole different way,” Mr. Trump said, congratulating the lawmakers behind him. “They have been working on this for years, years and years. And I just want to turn around and I want to thank them all. They are very, very special people.”

The lawmakers — many of whom face re-election next year — eagerly returned the favor as the president brought several of them to the lectern, where they offered a common refrain: paeans to Mr. Trump, his legislative victory and his presidency.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said Mr. Trump might end up being one of the country’s greatest presidents. Members of Congress who have at times been on the receiving end of brutal Twitter posts made by the president, including Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, returned the president’s praise in kind.

“This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration,” Mr. McConnell said, as the president grinned broadly behind him.

But though Mr. Trump listed a series of accomplishments during his first year in office, he confronts a challenge in the new year of persuading more Americans to get behind him.

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His approval rating in polls of the American public is at historic lows, with a majority of people holding negative views of his presidency. Next year, he will face a Senate majority that will have shrunk to just one vote, making it even harder to win approval for the rest of the Republican agenda.

And while his lawyers have suggested that they believe the special counsel’s Russia investigation is winding down, there is evidence that Mr. Trump and his associates will remain under scrutiny for months, if not longer. Two members of Mr. Trump’s campaign team have been indicted, and two others, including Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy consultant, have pleaded guilty to federal crimes and are cooperating with the special counsel.

The tax victory was a rare moment of legislative success for a president who has struggled to govern in a city that he derided as “a swamp.” He has repeatedly used Twitter, his favorite means of communication, to demean and belittle members of both parties, undermining Republican leaders and generating intense opposition from Democrats.

On Wednesday, he struck a different tone, posting on Twitter to praise Mr. McConnell for shepherding the tax bill through the bitterly divided chamber.

I would like to congratulate @SenateMajLdr on having done a fantastic job both strategically politically on the passing in the Senate of the MASSIVE TAX CUT Reform Bill. I could have not asked for a better or more talented partner. Our team will go onto many more VICTORIES!

—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Dec. 20, 2017

The president’s most significant legislative misstep was a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a Republican pledge that he echoed repeatedly on the campaign trail. In May, the president and his Republican allies in the House held what proved to be a premature victory ceremony over the chamber’s vote to replace the health care law, a feat that the Senate never matched.

The tax bill that passed includes the elimination of the Obama-era requirement that people have health insurance, handing Mr. Trump and Republicans a talking point when they confront constituents who expected full repeal of the health care law. Speaking to reporters before a cabinet meeting Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump bragged about getting rid of the health care mandate, saying that it amounted to a full repeal of Mr. Obama’s signature law.

“We didn’t want to bring it up,” Mr. Trump said. “I told people specifically, ‘Be quiet with the fake news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it.’”

Whether that proves to be a political victory for Mr. Trump and Republicans is unclear. Many of his core supporters will appreciate the move. But the president’s eager declaration that “Obamacare has been repealed” also means that he will be held responsible if premiums rise or people struggle to secure health insurance.

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The tax overhaul also provides a break to owners of pass-through businesses, whose profits are taxed through the individual code, and lowers the top individual rate to 37 percent, down from 39.6 percent. It nearly doubles the standard deduction and doubles the child tax credit and the size of inheritances shielded from estate taxation.

In a move that drew significant criticism from lawmakers from states with high taxes, the bill caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000. Twelve House Republicans voted against the tax bill, and 11 of those members were from California, New Jersey and New York, three states with high taxes.

It also opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling.

Polls suggest that most Americans view the tax overhaul with suspicion. In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, a majority of people said they saw the plan negatively, with only about 16 percent saying they believe it will lower their taxes. Democrats predicted Wednesday that the political benefits for Mr. Trump would evaporate quickly.

“He hasn’t accomplished any meaningful part of his legislative agenda since the beginning of the year,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado. He added, referring to the fact that the cut is so large that independent analysts say it will produce a deficit for years to come, “As soon as the American people see what’s in the bill, and that it borrows from their children to pay for it, it they will reject it.”

Republican lawmakers said they believed the public’s opinions about the tax overhaul would improve as more people began paying lower taxes next year. If they are right, the party could benefit just as lawmakers face voters in the fall.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who spent most of his almost 20 years in Congress pushing for an overhaul of the tax code, said he was “excited” about making good on a core part of the Republican Party’s orthodoxy.

“We are going to launch next year this fantastic tax reform so that the American people can see how we can truly reach our economic growth and our economic potential,” Mr. Ryan said.

In remarks before the cabinet meeting, Vice President Mike Pence offered the kind of effusive praise that Mr. Trump is unlikely to receive very often, even after the tax bill victory.

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“I want to thank you, Mr. President,” Mr. Pence said. “I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America. Because of your determination, because of your leadership, the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more, and we are making America great again.”

For the president, passage of the tax bill could be even more important — depending on how people come to view the legislation. As a candidate, Mr. Trump pitched himself as a champion of working Americans whose interests had been forgotten or ignored by a political establishment that cared little about their fortunes.

If people conclude that the tax bill lowers their taxes, that could improve Mr. Trump’s dismal job approval rating. If they decide that rich people and corporations benefit most, the president could anger his own supporters.

“Trumpism, in the end, as a domestic policy, comes down to jobs,” Mr. Gingrich said. “As a baseline of the conversation, he has to produce a better economy for anything else he is doing to make sense.”

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DUPONT, Wash. — The investigation into the fatal Amtrak crash near Tacoma, Wash., is focusing on the possibility that the engineer was distracted by a cellphone, another person in his cab or something else when the train barreled into a curve 50 miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

The crew did not activate the emergency brake before the derailment on Monday morning, said Bella Dinh-Zarr, the National Transportation Safety Board official overseeing the investigation, which might indicate that the engineer failed to perceive the danger.

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, she said the badly damaged cameras in the engineer’s cab — one facing forward, and the other inward, toward the person driving the train — had been sent to the safety board’s laboratory in Washington D.C. There, investigators will try to extract images showing what went on in the moments before the train plunged into a stand of trees and onto a busy highway, killing three people.

Ms. Dinh-Zarr stressed that the crew members — all of them hospitalized — had not yet been interviewed, and most of the evidence not yet analyzed. A data recorder on the train, carrying 77 passengers and seven crew members, indicated that it was racing at 80 miles per hour into a curve that is limited to 30 miles per hour, the safety board said. Excessive speed appeared to be the immediate cause of the crash, but the reason for that speed remained unknown.

“Distraction is one of our most wanted list of priorities at the N.T.S.B.” she said. “It’s protocol for us to look at all of the cellphone records of all the crew members whenever there is an accident of this type.”

There was a second person in the cab at the time of the crash, “a conductor who was getting experience and familiarizing himself with the territory,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said. While that is common practice, rail safety experts say it can also be a distraction to the engineer, a possibility that she said would be investigated.

Drug and alcohol testing of crews is routine after train accidents, and the inward-facing cameras could show not only whether the engineer was distracted, but also whether he was impaired or fatigued — factors that have been blamed in other rail accidents.

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Amtrak 501, on the Cascades service between Seattle and Portland, was the first to carry passengers on a new, faster route between Tacoma and Olympia, on tracks recently upgraded for passenger service. The unfamiliar, 14.5-mile stretch includes a spot where southbound trains leave a straightaway on a downhill slope before reaching the crash site, where the tracks curve onto an overpass crossing Interstate 5.

On that new part of the trip, “crews have been operating for at least two weeks prior to the accident with nonrevenue trains,” she said, including the engineer who was at the controls on Monday morning. But she would not say whether they had enough training before hauling passengers.

The fact that the train was on its inaugural run — and that the tracks had only recently been improved — may have contributed to the derailment, said Allan Zarembski, a professor of railroad safety and engineering at the University of Delaware.

The accident mirrored a 2015 crash in Philadelphia that killed eight people, when an Amtrak train took a turn much too fast and jumped the tracks. In the 2015 Philadelphia Amtrak derailment, the N.T.S.B. found that the engineer had lost “situational awareness” of where the train was on the route.

In this week’s accident, “the operator may not have been 100 percent familiar with that route or misjudged where he was and didn’t start to slow down for that curve,” Dr. Zarembski said. “I’m sure there was some familiarization, but the question is, how familiar was he with it?”

Operators generally carefully study documents known as track charts, which describe the route’s speed limits and tricky areas, before stepping into the cab, he said.

A former safety board railroad investigator, Russell Quimby, said that while there was no national standard for how many dry runs a railroad had to perform before opening a line, it was common to run practice trains under a variety of weather conditions and other circumstances.

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After a private briefing by investigators, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said, “there are a thousand unanswered questions about this right now.”

The safety board blamed the 2008 crash of a commuter train in Los Angeles, which killed 25 people, on the distraction of the engineer, who was composing a text message when he ran a red light and collided with a freight train.

That accident played an important role in evolving rail safety standards. It led the safety board to recommend inward-facing cameras in train cabs, and Amtrak committed in 2015 to installing them.

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The crash also prompted Congress to require that railroads adopt a system called positive train control — which the safety board has sought for decades — that automatically slows or stops a train that is moving too fast, or is in danger of running a red light or hitting another train. The law originally set a 2015 deadline for positive train control, which uses sensors both on the trains and along the tracks, communicating by radio frequencies. But after lobbying by railroads, Congress postponed the requirement.

“Unfortunately, the deadline was the end of 2015, but Congress extended that deadline to the train companies, and allowed them to have until the end of 2018,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.

Richard H. Anderson, the president of Amtrak, said at a news conference in Tacoma on Tuesday evening that it was too early to know whether positive train control could have prevented the accident. While some Amtrak routes have the technology, the Cascades line is scheduled to have it by the end of 2018, he said.

“We have to keep this as a wake-up call,” Mr. Anderson said. “It is not acceptable that we are involved in these kinds of accidents.”

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Sound Transit, the regional agency that owns the track where the train derailed on Monday, said the system had been installed along the line, and the Washington State Department of Transportation has said that the entire Cascades route will have the system by mid-2018.

“The locomotive was in the process of getting a P.T.C. system installed but it was not yet functional,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.

Last Friday, a Cascades train took local dignitaries on the new route, including Eric F. Corp, a DuPont city councilman. Long before then, he said, people who knew anything about the line knew that there was a big curve going over the highway, requiring a major slowdown.

“What speed we were going when we went around the corner I’m not sure, but it was slow and methodical,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were leaning or at no time did I think we were going too fast.”

Two of the people killed, Zack Willhoite and James Hamre, were close friends and rail enthusiasts, traveling together on the train’s first public voyage. Mr. Hamre, a retired engineer, was a volunteer for All Aboard Washington, a rail advocacy organization; Mr. Willhoite worked as a customer support specialist for Pierce Transit, a local transportation agency.

“It was just a given that they would be there,” said Lloyd Flem, a friend of the victims and the executive director of All Aboard Washington. “They had wanted to be on that very, very first run.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Flem said that he had seen both men just a few days ago and that they were eager to board the train early Monday morning.

On Tuesday, the scene of the crash, surrounded by police and emergency vehicles, began to look more like a construction site than a disaster. In a steady rain, huge cranes moved into place and began to lift the wrecked pieces of the train, while the crumpled remains of cars and trucks were loaded onto tractor-trailers to be taken away.

The crash left at least two coaches tumbled onto their sides, one of them on top of another coach, and two dangling precariously off the edge of the bridge; the locomotive that was pulling the train came to a stop on the highway. Of the 14 cars in the train, only the locomotive at the rear, which was not in use at the time, did not derail.

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The Virginia state capitol in Richmond. (Sue Kovach Shuman for The Washington Post)

The surprise victory of Democrat Shelly Simonds after a nail-biting recount has given Democrats yet another win in Virginia’s legislature, ending 17 years of Republican control.

But the question of who will be in control of the House of Delegates going forward is a bit up in the air. Simonds’s victory brought the House of Delegates to a rare 50-50 tie between the parties, a split that could change depending on the outcome of a couple of other recounts in the state. But the split raises questions about how the legislature will govern, given that Virginia has no official tie-breaking mechanism for its House of Delegates, if the results hold.

“It’s not a crisis,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center For Politics. “This happens almost every election in one of the 50 states.”

Some clues about how the state might proceed can perhaps be found by looking at how some recent partisan stalemates have been broken around the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks the bodies, notes more than 40 state legislatures that have dealt with even partisan splits in the last 50 years.

[Democrat Ralph Northam defeats Ed Gillespie in race for Virginia governor closely watched by national parties]

These splits have been resolved through a few ways:

1) State laws. At least three states have laws that help break ties, according to the NCSL. In the event of a tie in Montana and South Dakota, the leaders of the chambers are chosen from the party of the governor, for example. In Indiana, the speaker must be chosen by the party affiliated with either the governor, or the secretary of state, if the governor was not up for election.

2) Lieutenant governor’s vote. In about half of the states in the country, a lieutenant governor presides over the senate and can break ties the way a vice president can in the U.S. Senate. The Virginia Senate has considered this option during previous splits — Republicans currently have a two-vote margin — but it is not available to the state’s House of Delegates.

3) Coin toss. Not kidding. The use of coin toss helped break a legislative tie in Wyoming in 1974 and remains the preferred method to dealing with partisan gridlock, according to the NCSL.

4) Negotiation The most common way to break a legislative gridlock is through good old-fashioned dealmaking.

“Most ties have been settled when the two political parties negotiate a shared power agreement,” the NCSL says. Many states have negotiated power-sharing agreements that involve co-chairing leadership and committee positions. These include the Washington House in 1978, 1998, and 2000, the Indiana House in 1988, the Michigan House in 1992 and many others.

“The dual leaders and committee chairs alternate the times during which they preside,” the NCSL said. Some power structures alternated daily; others monthly or bimonthly.

Another way to compromise is a division of power made in the spirit of balance, giving one party a presiding officer and the other leadership of the most powerful committees, according to the NCSL. For example, in a divided house in Minnesota in 1978, “the speaker of the House was Republican, but the chairmen of the powerful rules, appropriations and tax committees were Democrats.”

The NCSL writes that deadlocked chambers have generally performed better than many expect. “Cooperation rather than confrontation seems to be key to the success of shared power in a chamber, as well as good will and the personalities of the players,” it noted.

In Virginia, the Democrats could have a slight upper hand given the near landslide victory that swept them into power, Sabato said, beginning with Gov. Ralph Northam.

“They had a wave with Northam, who deserves a lot of the credit,” he said. “Trump deserves even more credit. If the state Senate had been on the ballot, I’m convinced Democrats would have one that too. The Republicans are narrowly in charge of the Senate mainly because they weren’t on the ballot.”

Defections from one party to another are possible but not likely, Sabato said. And in a highly partisan era, compromise is going to be hard to come by, he said.

“It’s not going to be easy because of the polarization,” he said. “They’re politicians, they make do. They pursue partisan advantage when they can. And the voters spoke. They have to live with it.”

[A single vote leads to a rare tie for control of the Virginia legislature]

Of course, the final makeup of the legislature may yet change. Two additional recounts are taking place this week for seats won by slim margins: a Democrat in Richmond and a Republican in Fredericksburg, where Democrats are pushing for a new vote after 100 voters were given ballots for the wrong district.

There have been some famously split legislatures federally, of course. What is referred to by the Senate Historical Office as the Great Senate Deadlock of 1881 ensued after the 47th Congress convened, with 37 Republicans, 37 Democrats and two independents on the Senate. Each side was able to persuade one of the independents to join, giving the Republicans an edge with a Republican vice president. The independent who helped sway the advantage for the Republicans was awarded with a plum position as the chair of the powerful Agriculture Committee.

In recent times, the Senate found itself in a similar position in 2000, after a contentious election awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. Democrats, who had evened up the seats in the Senate and seen their candidate, Al Gore, take the popular vote, argued that the committees should reflect an even divide.

“The agreement for equal shares of committee seats — Republicans held all the chairmanships — was reached largely through a direct conversation between the two Senate leaders at the time, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott and South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle,” CNN reported.

And Republicans allowed Daschle to serve as Senate majority leader for 17 days until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in, before handing the position over to Lott.

Gregory S. Schneider contributed to this report. 

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