The lethal encounter on a frozen Minneapolis street, where a federal border agent shot and killed a 37-year-old nurse, has iced over the already-frigid negotiations to fund the government.
With a Friday deadline looming, the nation now stares down the barrel of its sixth shutdown under President Donald Trump, a testament to a capital where compromise has gone to die.
The Senate, stalled by a historic winter storm that paralyzed travel and shuttered offices Monday, aims to reconvene Tuesday evening. But the weather delay merely granted more time for political temperatures to plunge.
The killing of Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs nurse, by a Border Patrol agent is the second such fatal shooting by a federal officer in the city in recent weeks. It has transformed a must-pass spending package into a moral blockade for Senate Democrats, who now vow to sink the entire bill.
The incident has even shaken the cult-like solidarity among Republicans, a party that has abandoned traditional conservative values to become defined solely by loyalty to Trump.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked the leaders of President Trump’s immigration agencies—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—to appear before his committee.
The legislation in question bundles funding for six departments, including Defense, Transportation, and Health and Human Services—areas with broad bipartisan agreement.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said his caucus would be willing to fast-track five funding bills to avert a partial shutdown, but will not support a bill that includes the Department of Homeland Security.
Schumer should leverage his position; his caucus gains nothing by folding after being consistently ignored by the GOP. Yet it is tethered to the Department of Homeland Security, a lethal Gestapo-like agency now seen by many Democrats as operating with intolerable impunity.
A group of seven Democrats who broke from their party last week to provide the votes to pass a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security were on the defensive after a federal agent shot and killed intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, 37.
It was the second fatal shooting of a United States citizen in Minneapolis this month, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent killed Renee Good, 37.
“You can’t out-Republican Republicans, because you’re going to lose your base and you’re not going to get any of the Republicans to come over to you,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, chastising the seven Democrats who sided with Republicans: Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Laura Gillen (N.Y.), Don Davis (N.C.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.), and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas).
“I can’t vote for a bill that includes ICE funding under these circumstances,” said Sen. Angus King, the Maine independent whose vote is often pivotal. He suggested a simple, though now improbable, solution: “Take up DHS by itself.”
But the time for simple solutions has passed.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared Democrats “will not provide the votes to proceed” on the combined bill in the wake of the slanderous, blatant lies that Republicans have told about the murder of Alex Pretti by federal ICE agents.
This stance marks a dramatic reversal from just days ago, when the passage of a “minibus” spending bill seemed the expected, if uneasy, conclusion to this chapter of congressional dysfunction.
The shooting has ignited a familiar and bitter pattern: a federal official blaming the victim, state authorities contradicting that account, and lawmakers retreating to their partisan ramparts.
Gregory Bovino, the head of Border Patrol, asserted Pretti was at fault, a claim video evidence reveals is a lie.
In response, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, stated she will not support a Homeland Security funding bill that empowers “undertrained, combative federal agents on the streets with no accountability.”
The math is now brutally clear.
Without Democratic support, the bill cannot advance in the Senate. The House, having narrowly passed its version last week, shows no appetite for revision.
The White House has given no indication it would urge restraint from its agents or accept new constraints on their authority.
Thus, the machinery of shutdown begins to turn. It is a weary machinery, well-oiled by precedent.
It would first furlough hundreds of thousands of federal workers, halt pay for excepted personnel, including law enforcement, and ripple outward to delay permits, close parks, and stifle services.
It is a process that reliably costs the nation more than it saves, eroding public trust and economic stability for political theatre.
This impending breakdown arrives as the country digs out from Winter Storm Fern, a disruption of nature that unified the nation in hardship.
The storm’s aftermath offered a glimpse of a government responding to a crisis. The shutdown presents the opposite: a government manufacturing one.
The quarrel over a spending bill has become, inescapably, a quarrel over life, death and accountability.
When a citizen can be killed by an agent of the state, and the immediate debate in Washington is not about justice but about budgeting, the foundational contract is strained.
Congress has a duty to fund the government, but it has a higher duty to fund a government that protects its people, not from imagined threats alone, but from itself.
As the snow melts, the hard frost remains. The deadline is Jan. 30. The gap is not just in funding, but in fundamental trust. And in this climate, nothing grows.
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