Why not? In the House, the main problem was ultra-right-wing members, who don’t want to support even routine spending. Still, Republicans didn’t need Democrats to get a bill through.

However, passing the bill in the Senate will require 60 votes. With only 51 Republicans Democratic votes are needed.

Once upon a time a party that needed some help from across the aisle would have sought a deal that made some concessions to the other party’s agenda. And until a few days ago it seemed as if normal political rules still applied.

A bipartisan group of senators reached a deal that would have met a key Democratic priority: protecting the Dreamers — young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, who want to remain in the only country they have ever known. And in return for that agreement — which actually involved a number of concessions to Republicans — Democrats would have been willing to help keep the government running.

Protecting the Dreamers is, by the way, enormously popular, even among Republicans, who oppose deporting them by a huge margin. So it’s not as if the G.O.P. would be giving up a lot. But Donald Trump torpedoed the deal, apparently because he doesn’t want immigrants from “shithole countries.”

This sent Republican leaders back to the drawing board, and what they came up with was another doomsday threat, this time aimed at children.

You see, back in 1997 a bipartisan deal created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, an expansion of Medicaid to cover children who might not otherwise have been eligible. CHIP has been a huge success story, at modest cost. And at this point the Congressional Budget Office says that extending CHIP for another 10 years would actually save the government money, because some families forced off the program would end up receiving subsidies for more expensive sources of coverage.