** 1/26/26 - Ed Kilgore - How the Minneapolis Killing Made a Shutdown Inevitable.............
Buzz Sawyer
How the Minneapolis Killing Made a Shutdown Inevitable
At the start of the weekend, avoiding a partial government shutdown on January 30 still seemed like a possibility. Half of the 12 appropriations bills had already cleared both houses of Congress. The other six spending bills were pending in the Senate; after a freestanding vote on Department of Homeland Security funding scraped through the House, they’d been combined into a single package. If seven or eight Senate Democrats voted for the package (depending on what the typically spending-averse Rand Paul did), the government would stay open. And despite the growing firestorm in Minneapolis, Democratic senators had plenty of ways to rationalize voting to avoid a shutdown, including the simple fact that the cause of all the trouble — the masked agents of ICE, Border Control, and Homeland Security Investigations — already had a huge slush fund from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That all changed when Alex Pretti was shot to death in Minneapolis in what looked to most people who viewed the viral video like a public execution of a U.S. citizen. For once, Democrats were united in outrage and determination. They seized on the Senate-appropriations vote as the most obvious way to take a stand against the reign of terror President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation program has imposed on America’s cities. Self-styled moderates like Angus King, Tim Kaine, and Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar lined up to vow opposition to DHS funding until ICE and its masked colleagues were restrained in some way. For once, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t equivocate either. Even as Republicans and Trump himself seemed to grow concerned about what the images from Minneapolis were doing to public support for the administration and the GOP, there was no “Democratic disarray” on the subject. In short, the procedural house of cards that House and Senate Republicans built to get DHS money through Congress has fully collapsed. There’s no telling how long it will take to work out a new plan to fund the Pentagon, HHS, HUD, or the departments of Commerce, State, and Justice, much less DHS. Until then, $1.3 trillion in federal spending and hundreds of thousands of federal employees’ paychecks will be in limbo.
Senate Democrats initially demanded the DHS money be detached from the six-bill package so Congress could separately consider what to do about Kristi Noem’s thugs. But that would require a unanimous vote in the Senate, which seems impossible, even if many Republicans are developing buyer’s remorse about the implementation of the mass-deportation program nearly all of them joyfully supported. Thus, a partial shutdown appears unavoidable, and a longer-term resolution of the crisis over immigration enforcement won’t be easy to accomplish either.
Congressional Democrats will need to quickly formulate a consensus position on what must happen for them to support a full government reopening. Many party activists won’t be satisfied with anything short of a temporary, if not permanent, ICE shutdown and a national suspension of the armed assault on American cities. But mass deportation is too central an element of Trump’s agenda, and too near and dear to the hearts of the MAGA base, to be scaled back so dramatically. As always, Republicans are waiting for signals from The Boss, whose conflicting impulses are evident from this morning’s Truth Social message:
I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight. He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me. Separately, a major investigation is going on with respect to the massive 20 Billion Dollar, Plus, Welfare Fraud that has taken place in Minnesota, and is at least partially responsible for the violent organized protests going on in the streets. Additionally, the DOJ and Congress are looking at “Congresswoman” Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars. Time will tell all. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
Certainly looking like a rebuke to Noem and the ICE–Border Patrol hierarchy, this could be the first step toward a stand-down of hostilities in Minneapolis. At the same time, Trump can’t let go of the original rationale for targeting Minnesota: his efforts to pin a child-care fraud scandal on Somali immigrants and the Democratic Party, which were also reflected in his ludicrous demand over the weekend for federal legislation banning “Sanctuary Cities.”
The president is almost certainly feeling cross-pressured from his own advisers. The violence in Minneapolis reflects precisely the cycle of aggressive immigration enforcement and protest repression that Stephen Miller has been promoting from the beginning of Trump’s second term. But Republican operatives are acutely aware that Trump’s job-approval ratings on immigration — long his very strongest area of governance — are taking a nose dive and with them may fall any hope of Republicans hanging on to their control of Congress in November.
Until Trump plots a course out of this mess, it’s hard to see a path that doesn’t end in a partial shutdown at the end of this week. We may even be in for a long stretch of gridlock that breaks the record set by the government shutdown last fall.