Inside the Pence-Schumer showdown

For two straight days, Mike Pence and Chuck Schumer traded proposals and sat face-to-face in a breakneck sequence of meetings to prevent — then quickly end — a government shutdown.

In reality, though, the back-channel talks never stood a chance.

The failure by two men with little shared history and no apparent personal chemistry highlighted a critical difference between this showdown and those in the past: For years under President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell each maneuvered his party out of repeated political crises. But under President Donald Trump, who’s made no concerted effort to establish a genuine rapport with congressional Democrats, there’s no such release valve.

That’s largely why the two sides find themselves with no obvious way out of a week-plus government shutdown that’s threatening to stretch well into January.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/31/mike-pence-chuck-schumer-government-shutdown-2018-1076615