Hours ahead of a possible government shutdown, CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta debased his already self-centered act by playing the role of sycophant on Friday morning for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) by tangling with Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney over basic facts about Senate procedure.

“I was going to ask about your comment at the beginning of this, you said it is the Schumer shutdown. How can it be the Schumer shutdown when the Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate?” Acosta complained.

Thankfully, Mulvaney didn’t mince words in schooling Acosta, citing basic Senate rules about needing 60 votes to pass budgetary measures (such as continuing resolutions):

MULVANEY: Come on, you know the answer to that as well as anybody. I mean, I have to laugh when people say that, oh, we control the House and the Senate and the White House. ACOSTA: You do. MULVANEY: Why can't you get this done? You any as well as anybody it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass appropriations bill, right? You know that. ACOSTA: I know that but — MULVANEY: So you only have 51 votes in the Senate, then you have to have Democrat support in order to keep the government to fund the government. So, that's the answer to your question.

Acosta tried to save face by blaming the President for not wanting to go along with the Democratic pleas to save the illegal immigrants known as DREAMers. Referring to last week’s publicized White House meeting, Acosta fretted how that “seemed to be a fairly productive meeting and then the whole process got blown up and if I may, it seems that the whole process was blown up by the President's comments.”

The CNN hack then lobbied Mulvaney to just go along with the Democrats and DREAMers so we can move on, but the former conservative South Carolina congressman gave Acosta a history lesson:

[W]hen Republicans tried to add a discussion about ObamaCare to the funding process in 2013, we were accused by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer of inserting a non-fiscal — a non-financial issue into the spending process in order to shut the government down. How is that not exactly what is happening today? There is no reason that you have to deal with DACA this week. There’s no reason to deal with DACA before...the middle of February. DACA doesn't expire until March 5th. This is purely an attempt by the Senate Democrats, led by Mr. Schumer, it’s why we call it the Schumer shutdown, to try and get a shutdown they think this President gets blamed for.

Despite the fact that White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short later noted that the bipartisan group of Senators working on a DREAMer deal haven’t produced concrete legislation yet, Acosta used his post-briefing live shot on CNN to resume his Friday meltdown:

Well, shutdowns are a tough sale...and it sounds like, at this point, this White House is bracing for the likelihood that this government is going to shut down. You heard during this briefing with the legislative affairs director, Marc Short and the director of Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney — the director Mick Mulvaney saying this is the Schumer shutdown and they're trying to make the case that, well, because they need Democratic votes in the Senate to go along with what was passed in the House that this is somehow the responsibility of Democrats. That's just going to be a hard sell when you have Republicans in charge of the White House, the House and the Senate, and you've been talking about that for some time.

Acosta reiterated his tacit opinion that Trump should be to blame for the government shutdown over his “s***hole countries” line and quipped that Mulvaney promised “a kinder, gentler shutdown” in which “[t]he National Parks are going to be open, the trash may not get picked up but you can still visit your National Park.”

Here’s the relevant transcript from CNN’s At This Hour on January 18: