Michael Gold

government spending.

So if you think about the shutdown we had last year as a full government shutdown and the brief one we had earlier this month as a partial government shutdown, this is a very fractional government shutdown.

So for the last few months, Congress has really been working hard to pass all of its funding bills.

And this is something that Republicans, when they took control of both the House and Senate, set as a major priority.

They wanted to pass funding bills.

They wanted to pass individual funding bills, not one big package, and really hash out policy details for every government department.

That's right.

And a lot of members of Congress had complained that they had constantly been stuck voting for these big packages, but they never really got to haggle on the specifics of what went into those bills.

And so they've been working for months to find agreements, Republicans and Democrats, occasionally the White House, coming together to try to find a way that they could fund the government one department at a time.

I mean, they were putting together bills that cleared the House and Senate.

They were really working together to try to find compromises on things.

And it seemed like everything was on track until last month when Rene Good was shot and killed by an immigration agent in Minneapolis.

And that's when Democrats realized that they're on the verge of passing a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and the Border Patrol.

And so Democrats start to talk about how they can get serious changes to that bill that would impose some restrictions on the federal immigration operations and the deportation crackdown.

And they go back to the negotiating table.

with the White House and with Republicans, and they come up with a kind of compromise bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security that includes things like $20 million for body cameras and requirements that officers get enhanced training about use of force and de-escalation techniques.

Right.

They know they didn't get everything they wanted, but they feel like this is a pretty good compromise.

They're very committed to going through the regular funding process.

And they say, this is as good as we can get, and it's better to have some restrictions than no restrictions.