00:00The bitter tribalism that drove the United States into a government shutdown is putting
00:08compromise out of reach, analysts say, and threatening to turn a staring contest between
00:14the Democrats and Donald Trump's Republicans into a protracted crisis. As the nation enters
00:20its second week with federal agencies paralyzed, multiple strategists with vivid memories of
00:26previous standoffs, told AFP the president and his foes could be in it for the long haul.
00:33Andrew Konischewski, a former press secretary for Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader at
00:39the center of the latest deadlock, said, It's possible this shutdown drags on for weeks,
00:44not just days. He added, Right now, both sides are dug in and there's very little talk of compromise.
00:52At the heart of the showdown is a Democratic demand for an extension of health care subsidies that are
00:59due to expire, meaning sharply increased costs for millions of low-income Americans. On Sunday,
01:06Trump blamed minority Democrats for blocking his funding resolution, which needs a handful of their
01:12votes. They're causing it. We're ready to go back, Trump told reporters at the White House,
01:18sounding resigned to a shutdown dragging on. Trump also told reporters his administration has already
01:25started to permanently fire, not merely furlough, federal workers, again blaming his rivals for
01:32causing the loss of a lot of jobs. In March, when the threat of a shutdown last loomed, Democrats
01:39blinked first, voting for a six-month Republican resolution to keep the coffers stacked despite policy
01:45misgivings. But Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, was lambasted by the party's base and will be
01:53reluctant to cave this time around as he faces potential primary challenges from the left.
02:04For now, Senate Republicans are banking on their Democratic opponents giving in as they repeatedly
02:10force votes. Jeff Lee, a former senior official in California state politics, who negotiated with
02:17the first Trump administration, said, I could see a temporary agreement coming from both parties by the
02:24end of October. He added, anything beyond two months would halt government operations seriously
02:31and potentially impact national and homeland security considerations, casting blame on both parties.
02:38A shift in the strategy would likely depend on either side. Noticing public sentiment turning against
02:45them, analysts told AFP, polling so far has been mixed, although Republicans have been taking more
02:52flack than Democrats overall. Trump presided over the longest shutdown in history in 2018 and 2019,
03:01when federal agencies stopped work for five weeks. This time around, the president has been
03:07ratcheting up pressure by threatening liberal policy priorities and mass layoffs of public sector workers.
03:19James Druckmann, a politics professor at the University of Rochester, sees Trump's intransigence as a reason
03:26to believe this standoff could rival the 2019 record. He said,
03:31the Trump administration views itself as having an unchecked mandate and thus generally does not
03:38compromise. He added, Democrats have been critiqued for not standing strongly enough and the last
03:45compromise did not result in any positive outcome for Democrats. Thus, politically, they are inclined to
03:51stand firm. The 2018 to 2019 shutdown cost the economy $11 billion in the short term, according to the
04:01nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and $3 billion was never recovered. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott
04:09Besant has warned that the latest shutdown could wreak its own havoc on GDP growth. For California-based
04:16financial analyst Michael Ashley Schulman, the economic realities of the shutdown may be what end up
04:22forcing compromise. He said, if Wall Street gets spooked and Treasury yields spike, even the most ideologically
04:31caffeinated will suddenly discover a deep commitment to bipartisan solutions. Not all analysts are gloomy
04:39about the prospects for a quick resolution.
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