Hello and welcome to the Punch Bowl News Readback Podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen, and this week we're joined by Sammy Handler,

who's here to talk about all things DHS shutdown, which is stretching on now into its fourth week.

Sammy, thanks for joining me.

Tell me what is going on in the Senate

as they try to avert the shutdown without much success. Thanks, Max. Great to be back. Yeah,

so there's, in a sense, not a lot going on in the Senate in terms of the shutdown, right? There's

not much movement, which we saw this week,

but there's a lot of talk. And I'd say tensions are really escalating over this shutdown, which,

I mean, I don't know about you, but it felt like a really odd shutdown to me. I mean, we've had a

few this Congress. And it was up until this week, you know, I didn't really think lawmakers were talking

much about it. But then tensions really erupted. We saw a lot of back and forth over whether

or not Senate, Democrats, Republicans were even going to meet about the shutdown, whether there

was even a meeting request, things like that. They

couldn't even agree on a sit down. And then we saw a real floor debate a couple times this

week, which was really fascinating, but also shows there's not much private movement, right?

Yeah, I think that debate over whether there's a meeting cancelor, I mean, that just kind of

shows how granular these talks or lack of talks are, right?

Let's just take a step back for a second.

So, Department of Homeland Security is shut down mainly because Democrats are not happy

with the way ICE immigration enforcement is being

handled. Democrats have said they are happy to fund the other parts of DHS, but not ICE.

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