Inside the negotiations that produced a deal to end the shutdown

By Annie Grayer, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — On the 38th day, the logjam began to break.

After Republicans rejected a Democratic proposal to reopen the government, a small group of moderate Democrats met with Majority Leader John Thune on Friday, forging a path toward resolving the record-long shutdown, multiple sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN.

By Sunday evening, the cross-aisle talks opened between Thune and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, Angus King and Tim Kaine had yielded a deal that eight Democrats broke ranks to advance. By Monday evening, the Senate had voted 60-40 to pass the measure, which now heads to the House before President Donald Trump – who’s signaled support — can sign anything.

The government could now be reopened by the end of the week. What comes next is far less certain, with questions looming about the fallout for both parties as Democrats face internal recriminations and Republicans are forced to grapple with the political liabilities of rising health care premiums.

The White House has sought to limit its public comments on the deal, wary of disrupting a tentative agreement that still faces a tricky path through the House. But internally, the sudden end to the impasse prompted a sense of vindication that the outcome that officials had predicted for weeks had finally come to pass, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump and his top aides had decided in September to take a hard line against negotiating with Democrats, confident that the party would cave as soon as it became clear they wouldn’t win any concessions from the administration.

“I think he made a mistake in going too far,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham in an interview Monday about Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who voted against the deal later Monday but who had been kept in the loop on the moderates’ conversations with Thune, one of the sources familiar said.

“He just went too far. He thought he could break the Republicans, and the Republicans broke him,” Trump added.

But reaching that point took far longer than anyone in the White House anticipated; many officials believed Democrats would fold in a matter of hours to days. It also came at a cost, with Trump and Republicans taking the brunt of the public blame for the shutdown, culminating in a brutal set of state-level electoral losses last week.

Spooked by those results, Trump in recent days had begun urging Republicans to abandon their strategy and unilaterally open the government by eliminating the filibuster — an idea that proved deeply unpopular with GOP leaders and succeeded only in dividing his party.

Yet even as urgency built within the administration to find an end to the shutdown, officials contended that a similar level of pressure must be building on the Democratic side. In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s breakthrough, Trump aides had privately discussed minor concessions they might be willing to make to help Republican senators clinch an eventual deal, two people familiar with the deliberations said.

Still, few expected the opportunity would come when it did, with Democrats riding high from the elections and their base louder than ever in urging them to hold the line.

As the talks between Democratic moderates and Thune accelerated, some of the potential concessions that aides had contemplated quickly became a central component of the bipartisan agreement, as Democrats pressed for a reversal of the mass firings of federal workers that the administration had carried out during the shutdown and protections against future layoffs.

The White House agreed. On Monday, Kaine told CNN that a provision barring further reductions in force through January had been key to convincing him to sign on to the deal.

“I was the one negotiating the federal worker protections, and when I got a yes from the White House at 4:45 yesterday on the key component of guaranteeing no future RIFs, that was very persuasive to me,” the Virginia Democrat said.

Democrats were also able to secure furloughed federal employees’ back pay — but not the extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that had been their original and consistent demand.

The acceptance of the deal came from a realization among Democrats that Republicans simply were not going to cave on that issue.

“The question I was wrestling with is: if the tactic isn’t working and there were no prospects that it was going to work, then let’s move on, not make a lot of other people suffer in order to get a goal that wasn’t attainable,” King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said on CNN Monday morning.

There was immediate blowback. Leading Democratic figures and potential 2028 presidential candidates railed against the deal and its negotiators. House Democratic leadership even urged their members to put out statements calling on Democratic senators to hold the line Sunday night, a source familiar with the messaging push told CNN, and a range of House Democrats rushed to announce their “no” votes.

But within the group of eight Democratic senators, the lawmakers argued that they’d made the only sensible move available, especially as the pain mounted for everyday Americans.

“Now I understand that not all of my Democratic colleagues are satisfied with this agreement, but waiting another week or another month wouldn’t deliver a better outcome,” said Shaheen, who’s not running for reelection to her New Hampshire seat next year.

While the quartet of Democratic former governors had worked in overdrive through a combination of meetings and phone calls out of King’s Senate hideaway, those negotiations hadn’t just begun over the weekend.

Shaheen, Hassan — also from New Hampshire — and King had been quietly talking with Republican leadership for weeks to lay the groundwork for a deal. Thune had long said that the path toward a deal would be through conversations with rank-and-file Democrats, not Democratic leadership.

Kaine told reporters that he spoke with Thune and GOP Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama throughout the negotiations over the weekend and made the case directly that the deal needed to include a moratorium on firings of federal employees.

Asked whether he wished Democrats had cut a deal sooner, Kaine, who didn’t truly join the negotiations until after Tuesday’s elections, said of Republicans: “I didn’t fully understand how dug in they were.”

In fact, moderate Democrats had agreed to give Schumer and their fellow Democratic senators one last shot to do it their way on Friday, filing into the chamber behind the New York Democrat as he presented his party’s latest offer to open the government in exchange for extending the ACA subsidies.

But Republicans rejected it as a nonstarter.

“Plan A was over on Friday when Republicans ruled it out,” one of the sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN.

The eventual deal they did accept, however, presents a new quandary for the GOP. With Thune promising a separate vote on the subsidies next month, White House aides are already turning their attention to hashing out a coherent position on health care.

“I think the question is how they push back on the inevitable Democratic narrative that Republicans are killing health care in the US,” one of the people familiar with the matter said. “What is the Republican response to the inevitable refrain: ‘They don’t have a plan.’”

Said Shaheen: “We have a guaranteed vote by a guaranteed date on a bill that we will write, not that the Republicans will write.”

Pressed on Republicans’ message on health care during a Fox Business interview on Monday, White House deputy chief of staff James Blair indicated the answer remained a work in progress.

“We have a good plan to be able to address some of these issues that will begin to be worked on in earnest now,” Blair said, without offering specifics. “I expect that we’ll see action on that very soon.”

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