Maine’s two U.S. senators had a hand in the Common Sense Coalition, a bipartisan group that crafted the framework for ending the federal government shutdown.
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine led the effort to reconvene the coalition, which was instrumental in ending the federal government shutdown five years ago. She says members of both parties, and independent U.S. Sen. Angus King of Maine, met in her office to craft a resolution ending the current stalemate.
“Republicans as well as Democrats, all of whom are committed to getting to a solution. That is a powerful voting bloc in the Senate,” she says.
Collins says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Tennessee, has committed to work on several major issues and to call for a floor vote on legislation to grant legal status to those protected under DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
There are roughly 700,000 immigrants who are in the country illegally after being brought here as children that are covered by that program. If agreement is not reached by Feb. 8, when the continuing resolution runs out, McConnell promises to bring the issue to the floor for debate until a compromise is reached.
Collins says there are other issues that will have to be resolved over the next three weeks.
“The most important thing is that we have government reopen and continue the negotiations on the budget caps, which will give the military and some of our domestic programs like opioid funding the money that is needed,” she says, referring to efforts to pass a budget for the rest of the current year that runs out in October.
Once agreement on overall spending caps are reached, the appropriations bills will need to be rewritten. King says that’s a lot of work to accomplish in three weeks.
“I think it’s possible, you know I will believe it when I see it, but I do think it is possible. The hard one is going to be DACA. Basically, on DACA we have a twofold opportunity,” he says.
King says he is one of the coalition senators that has been tapped to work on the DACA issue in hopes of passing a compromise bill before the Feb. 8 deadline. He says if a measure cannot be worked out, McConnell will allow consideration of the issue by the full Senate to work out a compromise.
King says the work of the coalition may signal the growing influence of moderates in the Senate.
“We want to keep this effort going outside of the context of a shutdown. That may be one of the important outcomes of this, is the emergence of a strong middle,” he says.
While the Senate has passed the short-term spending bill, it must still pass the House and be signed by President Donald Trump before the shutdown is ended.
This story was originally published Jan. 22, 2018 at 5:17 p.m. ET.
