IF YOU want to shut down a government as painlessly as possible, do it over a weekend. The federal government closed for business at 12.01am on Saturday, January 20th and reopened on Monday night, after the Senate passed a bill to fund it until February 8th. This was the ninth such shutdown since 1980. Because the party with less power in Washington can usually derail the annual budgeting process, it will not be the last. Familiarity breeds eye-rolling. It is nevertheless remarkable that the world’s pre-eminent power so frequently fails to pay for its government on time. And though the shutdown is over, the disputes that provoked it remain unresolved, and look likely to recur in the coming weeks.

Republicans have an inherent advantage in shutdown politics. The party’s animating philosophy is that government should be smaller and do less. A closed government does less. When Democrats back a shutdown, as happened this time, it undercuts their claim to be the non-crazy party of governance and regular order. This bias towards stability can enrage the party’s left flank, whose members have a grudging respect for Republican intransigence. After the deal was done, demonstrators chanting “Undocumented, Unafraid” and “They say get back; We say fight back” packed the hallway outside the office of Charles Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

The blockage was cleared by a face-saving manoeuvre. Democrats agreed to reopen the government without getting their chief demand—a legislative fix for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Barack Obama’s executive order that shielded from deportation about 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to America as children, which President Donald Trump cancelled last September. Republicans, for their part, loaded up the reopening bill with six years of funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Programme, which provides health insurance to poor children. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested he would bring a DACA bill up for a vote before February 8th.

Mindful of future primaries, and of the more than a million people who took to the streets in the Women’s March two days earlier to protest against Mr Trump, Democratic senators with presidential aspirations voted no. Ben Wikler of MoveOn, a pressure group allied with the Democrats, says that once the party had made the decision to stand and fight, the best thing to do would have been to “make your case to the public…Democrats and pro-DREAMers [as DACA recipients are known] have a winning argument to make.” Polls back Mr Wikler’s claim. Majorities in both parties believe that DREAMers, who are American in all but paperwork, should be allowed to stay, either as citizens or as permanent legal residents. But Michael Steel, who was press secretary to John Boehner, House Speaker during the last shutdown in 2013, notes that “there is a difference between popularity and intensity. Support for protecting the DREAMers is high, but support for shutting down the government to achieve that goal is low.”

To hold out longer would have carried particular risks for the ten Democratic senators up for re-election in states that Mr Trump won in 2016. Voters in five of those states received robocalls accusing their senators of having “prioritised illegal immigrants over American citizens”. The longer the shutdown battle continued, the more it would have deepened the fissure between elected Democrats from safe seats and those at greater risk—and, perhaps more important, between the party’s activist wing and the centrist voters it needs to take the Senate. As it is, the shutdown’s brevity and the lunatic speed of news in the Trump era means it will probably be forgotten by November when the mid-term elections roll round.

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And yet despite all the energy of campaigners, the fraught negotiations, the posturing and the welcome emergence of a moderate caucus, huddled in the office of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Congress is not much closer to fixing the status of the DREAMers, which should be the easiest of immigration questions to resolve. The Republican stance on immigration seems to be hardening. Mr Trump at first urged legislators to craft a bipartisan “bill of love”, which he would sign. Lindsay Graham and Dick Durbin, Republican and Democratic senators respectively, came up with a bill that gives DREAMers a path to citizenship, funds some of Mr Trump’s border wall (his insistence that Mexico will pay for it seems to have evanesced) and eliminates the Diversity Visa programme, which provides green cards for immigrants from places that send few people to America. A spokesman for Mr Trump said the president would still not sign it.

House Republicans favour a bill that would give some DACA recipients legal status but not citizenship. It would also end the Diversity Visa, bar immigrants from sponsoring family members other than spouses and young children of American citizens (doing otherwise, Republicans argue, would let DACA recipients reward their parents, who decided to enter America illegally) and enact a host of other restrictions that could cut legal immigration by up to 38%. That bill would never pass the Senate.

The gap between the two parties illustrates how toxic America’s immigration debate has become. During the shutdown, Mr Trump’s permanent campaign released an ad that snarled, “Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” The ad conflates DREAMers—who by law cannot have committed a felony—with criminals, just as the robocalls conflated people who willingly entered America illegally and those who came in their parents’ arms.

Despite the rancour, the contours of a solutions are visible, if just faintly. Mr Trump will release a “legislative framework” on January 29th, based on four “agreed-upon pillars”: a DACA fix, border security, and an ending to both the Diversity Visa and to “extended-family chain migration.” The first three should be just about acceptable to most members of both parties. The last is trickier. Democrats have expressed some willingness to end family migration for DACA recipients, but not for everyone. Last weekend’s brief shutdown may presage a longer one, next month.