00:00And breaking right now, the government has officially, partially shut down, but we are being told it should be short-lived because the Senate has passed a bill tonight to fund most of the government.
00:12The House now expecting to pass it as soon as Monday, probably Monday evening, but that deal is now setting up a brand new showdown over the Department of Homeland Security because the Democrats are refusing to fund it for more than two weeks as they demand new restrictions for ICE.
00:30Watch.
00:31Judicial warrants, the masks have to come off, and body cameras need to be turned on.
00:40The loon wing of the Democratic Party is in control, and they want to defund ICE.
00:46Yeah.
00:47Well, the panel is standing by with expert analysis as the government now at 1201 on the East Coast officially shut down.
00:53But we begin with the chief congressional correspondent, Chad Pergram, live on Capitol Hill with what he calls his candy bar breakdown.
01:00Chad, what can you tell us?
01:01Yeah.
01:02Candy bar breakdown.
01:03This is a partial government shutdown.
01:05About 78% of the federal government is now shut down.
01:09Unfunded right now is the Pentagon, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation.
01:14But the best way to understand this is through a Kit Kat bar.
01:17Now, last week, the House of Representatives passed a full spending bill for all of these departments and sent this over to the Senate.
01:25So in order for the government to stay funded and stay open, they have to pass the entire bar.
01:30Well, Democrats started to say, we need some changes with ICE.
01:34So we want to defund the Department of Homeland Security, only fund it for a certain period of time.
01:40And so what they did is they broke off the DHS funding bill.
01:44Well, at that point, the Senate and the House of Representatives were not aligned.
01:48So they passed this entire spending bill on this side, you know, as I say, the Pentagon and the other departments, and then just a two-week Band-Aid for the Department of Homeland Security.
01:58So they have to pass in the House of Representatives what the Senate did.
02:01Otherwise, the government shutdown continues.
02:03Now, as you say, that vote will be sometime probably Monday night.
02:07It appears that there's probably about a 70 percent chance that they pass this.
02:11Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, had a conference call with Republicans this evening and implored them, A, to be here.
02:17There's some transportation issues in the country, as you know, because of the weather.
02:21It says we might need to carry all the freight on our side of the aisle.
02:25Some Democrats will probably vote for this.
02:28But there's a lot of Democrats, and we're hearing this in the past couple of hours here, that they're not privy to this agreement that was worked out between the president and Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats.
02:38So maybe this is something that just is passed by mostly Republicans in the House of Representatives.
02:44But it's going to be a challenge, again, to keep DHS funded in just a couple of weeks here.
02:49That is not much time.
02:51And Democrats are going to be saying to their base, look, we did something that you wanted.
02:56We couldn't defund ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, but we compelled a partial government shutdown at least for a couple of days to show that we are fighting and we're trying to get these provisions in, these guardrails for ICE.
03:08Meantime, Republicans on their side with the politics there, they'll say, we welcome some of this battle.
03:14They believe, according to Eric Schmidt, the Republican senator from Missouri, that they are playing on their home field because this deals with the border.
03:22That's an issue that they want on in 2024.
03:25And they can use the next two weeks, Trace, to talk about the importance of the border and the root causes of what's going on in Minnesota.
03:33So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that everything goes as planned and Monday night the House comes back and they pass this.
03:39At some point, Chad, do they have to make the candy bar whole again?
03:42Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing.
03:44Because you have to make two weeks down.
03:46But what if in two weeks they can't come to terms on the whole DHS funding?
03:51And then what happens then?
03:52Does the government, is there a threat to shut the government down again or just the DHS funding?
03:57Is that permanently separate?
03:59Yeah, it's permanently separate.
04:01The rest of the candy bar funds the government through the end of September.
04:06That's the key.
04:07But if you have that DHS part and you haven't gotten that in two weeks' time, then just DHS shuts down.
04:14And so they might have to come back to that well again and again and again.
04:18John Thune, the majority leader in the Senate, told me he thought that two weeks would beget two more weeks and two more weeks on top of that.
04:24Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, basically said the same thing.
04:27But the Democrats want DHS to be shut down for good, they say.
04:32So it would behoove them to not pass the funding bill for DHS.
04:36Well, you see, and that's the point here.
04:38And this is where some Republicans are saying we like what ICE is doing.
04:41You have, you know, Rick Scott, you know, who has defended ICE here to some degree.
04:46You certainly have Eric Schmidt, who I mentioned earlier, Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina.
04:51And they believe that this is kind of a backdoor way for Democrats to really cut into ICE.
04:56But the other thing I should say, and this is very important, is that during the big, beautiful bill, the passage of that last summer,
05:02the Republicans put into that piece of legislation, you know, tens of billions of dollars to fund ICE through 2029.
05:11So even if you were to not fund DHS, you're not defunding ICE.
05:16It's an optics issue for the Democrats.
05:18Again, I talk about the politics of this.
05:20But you can maybe legislatively put in those guardrails that they want and say,
05:24well, look, we're not going to provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
05:28It's a hot potato until we get our policy demands.
05:31I'm Steve Doocy.
05:32I'm Brian Kilmeade.
05:33And I'm Ainsley Earhart.
05:34And click here to subscribe to the Fox News YouTube page to catch our hottest interviews
05:39and most compelling analysis.
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