There IS gonna be a partial Government shutdown come midnight….

The backdrop:

• In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed forward on a procedural motion, but he doesn’t seem to have the votes to pass a bill with border funding.
• The House passed a bill with border cash last night. If the stalemate goes until January, Democrats are in the driver seat.
• Trump sent VP Mike Pence, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and son-in-law Jared Kushner to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The big picture: “The shutdown, scheduled for midnight, would disrupt government operations and leave hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed or forced to work without pay just days before Christmas,” the AP reports.

Between the lines: Trump has resumed his longtime campaign to get McConnell to abandon the filibuster. Don’t expect this to happen, Axios’ Caitlin Owens emails.

• Senate institutionalists believe that the filibuster makes the Senate work the way it’s supposed to — in a slow, bipartisan manner.
• Republicans will be wary of blowing the filibuster now when Democrats are about to take the House and won’t pass any Republican priorities. It also could backfire if and when Democrats eventually retake the Senate…..

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Democrats seem to holding together against the Trump effort to extort money for the wall from them…They will NOT go along with the House bill to give Trump what he wants….

If the shutdown was to actually go long as Trump has predicted?

The House will switch over to a majority Democratic place and there will NEVER be wall money….

Trump has about 13 days before the window closes on Republican control of the House….

Trump’s GOP lawmakers ARE suffering though….

Across the Capitol complex this week, lawmakers wore tired, gloomy looks on their faces as they limped to the finish line of the 115th Congress. They wanted to be anywhere but here over the holidays — especially the lame-duck Republicans who lost their reelection bids last month.

One cranky Republican said he wanted to rip the phone away from Trump, who’s been agitating for a Christmas shutdown over demands for his $5 billion border wall.

“The president tweets too much!” the lawmaker said. “I shave [myself] but I don’t tweet about it!”

Earlier Thursday, a closed-door meeting of House Republicans descended into chaos when member after member stood up at the microphone and rejected leadership’s initial plan to quickly take up a funding bill without Trump’s wall.

Another frustrated GOP lawmaker called leadership “stupid” for holding a meeting before a vote on the clean continuing resolution, or CR. They should have just put it on the floor, the lawmaker said.

The unexpected revolt came after lawmakers began receiving hundreds of phone calls from constituents outraged that Republicans were not demanding Trump’s wall before relinquishing control of the House to Democrats next month. Conservative radio and TV hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity had personally lobbied Trump to shut the government down if Democrats don’t give him his wall; Trump got the message and vowed to fight.

“Do we succumb to tyranny of talk-radio show hosts? I mean, this is a juvenile place we find ourselves,” retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn) told reporters on Friday. “The reason we’re here is that we have a couple talk-radio hosts that get the president spun up.”…

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Luke Russert Retweeted NBCWashington