Rep. Collin Peterson on the government shutdown

Monday was the first workday that federal employees are off the job, after an impasse led to a government shutdown on Friday. But under a proposal taking shape in the Senate, Democrats would agree to a three-week spending measure, until Feb. 8, in return for a commitment from Republican Senate leadership to address immigration policy.

U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson represents Minnesota's 7th District, and was one of the few Democrats to vote in favor of a GOP-led spending bill in the House last week. MPR News host Cathy Wurzer spoke with Peterson about the shutdown.

Comments have been edited for clarity and concision.

You've been around a while. What do you expect will happen in the Senate today?

I have no idea what they're going to do over there. I don't know how many shutdowns I've been through, it's been a few. But this is completely unnecessary, and what this shows you is how broken our system is. This top-down, leadership-driven system when you have a 60-vote margin in the Senate just doesn't work. And the Budget Committee, which is supposed to actually make it easier to deal with these issues, actually makes it harder, because it's so partisan and so polarized that again, they can't get a House budget through the Senate, and that's the problem here at the end of the day.

I talked to the Speaker yesterday morning, and he says well, they can do whatever they want over there, but our position is that we have to have a clean — if they pass our bill, we'll pass it again, or something close to it. So he doesn't appear to be in any mood to do anything about DACA that's tied to this continuing resolution. And what worries me is the Senate is not talking to him, it doesn't seem like.

So from what I can see, the only thing that's going to work is if they come back with something out of the Senate that's clean, that keeps the government open for whatever period of time — I think they're flexible on that. The Senate may agree to have a vote on the Dreamers, but I don't think they're going to be able to get the commitment out of the House to do that.

Is it your sense that your Democratic colleagues in the Senate are feeling political pressure? The messaging from Republicans in the White House are Democrats are siding with illegal immigrants over the military. You heard the rhetoric. Is this turning into a political problem for Democrats?

Yes. It is a problem, I think, and it doesn't belong in — this is, you know, immigration is not part of the appropriation process to keep the government running. It's a separate issue. Now I know people are frustrated, but this is not a crisis. The program goes until March sometime. And the president by terminating it, he created this problem. But then a judge — I don't know if it was a judge or the Ninth District, whatever it was — said that the president couldn't do what he did. So now that has been lifted, this March thing has been lifted. The question at that point is, what's going to happen? You know, is the Ninth District going to deal with this, is it going to go to the Supreme Court, whatever.

I talked to an immigration lawyer who's done this for 20 years and he thinks that this is going to be -- the president's deal is going to be stopped for a considerable period of time. So he doesn't see this as a big crisis situation like some people do. So yeah, I think they're feeling the heat.

Well, Representative Collin Peterson, I appreciate your time here this morning on this. By the way, how long do you think this shutdown is going to last?

Well, I don't know. I mean if they have any sense, the Senate will get 10 people that are going to vote to send the House something they can live with, and we can get this thing over with. If they don't, it could drag on a long time. And the longer it drags on, the more people we hurt, the more money it costs us. It's not any way to run the railroad.