The Government Shut Downs After Failed Vote

A procedural vote to proceed with a spending bill failed late Friday night.

Ting Shen/ZUMA

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The federal government shut down at midnight Saturday, following the failure of last-minute budget negotiations to create a stopgap solution to protect the nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. The nail-biting showdown coincides with the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration—a milestone Democrats are portraying as a glaring failure of leadership, given that Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress but were unable to muster the votes to pass the bill.

A critical procedural vote needed for the motion to proceed failed around 10:30 p.m. All but five Democrats appeared to vote “No”, joined by four Republicans: Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah), and Lindsay Graham (S.C.).

Republicans, though, are doing their best to sidestep blame, claiming Democrats are holding government hostage to their demands. Earlier on Friday, OMB director Mick Mulvaney said the White House was preparing for “what we’re calling the ‘Schumer shutdown.’”

As Mother Jones’ Kara Voght reports, only about half of federal agencies have publicly shared up-to-date contingency plans in the event of a shutdown. So many people could be screwed by the shutdown—including the president himself, whose social life took a hit Friday night when, with an agreement unsecured, he canceled his trip to Mar-a-Lago. It remains to be seen if he’ll resume his plans to celebrate one year in office Saturday with a $100,000-per-couple fundraiser at the resort.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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