GOP challenges Schumer to avoid shutdown

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, who is threatening a government shutdown over immigration, opposed that exact strategy five years ago, saying in 2013 that it would be “governmental chaos” to threaten a shutdown over his own demands for immigration reform.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan raised Mr. Schumer’s comments Thursday as he pleaded for Democrats to forgo a shutdown showdown.

Mr. Ryan said he’s confident there are enough Republicans to pass a stopgap spending bill through the House later Thursday, just ahead of a Friday deadline for government funding.

“I have confidence we’ll pass this,” he said.

But a filibuster is looming in the Senate, where rank-and-file Democrats are lining up to announce their opposition to any deal that doesn’t legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”

Mr. Schumer, Democrats’ Senate leader, hasn’t outright embraced a shutdown but has insisted that any short-term spending bill to keep the government open must be accompanied by his party’s priorities.

Republicans said that’s the opposite of what he said in 2013, when he opposed a GOP-led shutdown showdown over Obamacare.

“We believe strongly in immigration reform. We could say, ’we’re shutting down the government, we’re not gonna raise the debt ceiling, until you pass immigration reform.’ It would be governmental chaos,” Mr. Schumer told ABC in 2013.

For his part Mr. Schumer blamed President Trump for the problems with negotiating a final deal, pointing to the president’s tweet that seemed to challenge Republicans’ decision to include a six-year extension of a children’s health fund in a one-month stopgap “continuing resolution,” known in Capitol-speak as a “CR.”

“It’s a mess,” the New York Democrat said. “We can’t keep careening from short-term CR to short-term CR. If this bill passes, there will be no incentive to negotiate and we will be right back here in a month with the same problems at our feet.”

Mr. Schumer also wondered whether House Republicans will be able to pass the bill in the first place, after some Senate Republicans said they wouldn’t vote for it.

“The one thing standing in our way is the unrelenting flow of chaos from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It has reduced the Republicans to shambles,” Mr. Schumer said.