Guardian Washington correspondent Paul Lewis (@PaulLewis) is in the streets of Washington DC, a city in which the government is not just the main employer, but the lifeblood of the city. The impacts of the shutdown were immediately visible, Paul writes:

By mid-morning, downtown Washington DC had the throng of a busy lunchtime, as furloughed workers from all the major government buildings trickled out onto the streets after closing down their offices.

Everywhere from obscure government agencies to the White House was operating on a slimmed-down staff, with all so-called ‘non-excepted’ employees ordered to return home after turning up to work on Tuesday morning.

DC’s mayor, Vincent Gray, immunised many staff working for the city’s government from the shutdown, by declaring them all ‘essential’ workers, a legally contentious measure. But it at least kept the city movement, and guarded America’s capital from less sightly impacts of the last shutdown, in the 1990s, when uncollected trash piled up on the street.

Later we’ll have Paul’s interviews with tourists and federal workers talking about how the shutdown is affecting them.

Veterans of World War II have stormed their own memorial on the National Mall, barricades be damned, reporter Leo Shane III of Stars and Stripes tweets:

Honor flight vets just knocked over the barriers at the WWII memorial to get inside, #shutdown or no.

No sign of folks leaving. The vets have control of the memorial. #shutdown

John McCain may be trying to make a point by publicizing polling showing Americans oppose the GOP strategy of tying the shutdown to health care cuts, but most national polls on who gets blamed are rather useless in understanding what’s going through the mind of the House GOP, Guardian polling analyst Harry J Enten (@ForecasterEnten) writes.

Harry argues that, district-for-district, Republicans really aren’t vulnerable to voter outrage in midterm elections in 2014 because the districts are rigged:

While there are a number of reasons why House Republicans were willing to shut down the government, no answer is probably as satisfying as the fact that majority of House Republicans don’t live in districts that look anything like the rest of the nation. Thanks to urban packing and gerrymandering, Republicans don’t have to worry about losing to a Democrat.

The average vote share for President Obama in 2012 in Republican House districts was only 40.4%. Only 17 members of the Republican House caucus are from districts that voted for Obama in 2012. More than half of Republicans in the House come from districts that are 10 points more Republican than the nation as a whole. The average Republican district is over a 11 points more Republican than the nation.

The thing that most worries most members is likely a primary challenge, not a general election. The fact that more Republicans support a shutdown to stop Obamacare, as Quinnipiac found, is what’s most important for them.

That analysis leaves open the question on whether blowback from the shutdown represents potential damage to a party’s national brand, with consequences for membership, fundraising, turnout, activism, public support in hard policy fights and more.

Shut down: Tweets from Voyager 2. 

Not to be confused with Voyager 1, which recently entered interstellar space. Voyager 2 is only 15.37bn km away, according to the Nasa site that tracks it, which interestingly is still online here.

Shut down: the US Census Bureau online. 

You can’t visit the web site here, but you can read a shutdown notice.

(h/t @kennelliott)

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who with Ted Cruz of Texas led the charge to tie stopgap spending legislation to changes to Obamacare, is delivering a speech on the Senate floor calling for a focus on people whose livelihoods will be damaged by the government shutdown. “I want to focus our attention in the coming days and hours on those people,” Lee says, gravely.

It turns out however that mostly Lee wants to continue his critique of the Affordable Care Act. “I’d like to turn for a moment to people who are and for a number of months have been already [hurting],” he says. “Obamacare happens to be the No.1 job-killer in the country.”

Threatened by shutdown: airport efficiency(!).

Here’s a question from the comments:

Answer, in short: Yes, expect some delays, but security will remain tight. The Transportation Security Administration, part of the department of Homeland Security, is expected to furlough certain nonessential employees, but those do not include most screeners. Air traffic controllers will report for work as usual.

John McCain, Republican of Arizona, argued Monday against the House Republican shutdown strategy, telling the House to accept fate and pass a “clean” spending resolution.

This morning McCain indulges in a preliminary bit of “I told you so,” directed at Republican colleagues:

From the Bloomberg story:

By 72 percent to 22 percent, Americans oppose Congress “shutting down major activities of the federal government” as a way to stop the Affordable Care Act from going into effect, the national survey from Quinnipiac University found. [...]

A majority of the public, 58 percent, is opposed to cutting off funding for the insurance program that begins enrollment today. Thirty-four percent support defunding it.

Note that the poll featured in the story McCain links to is from last week; while the Bloomberg story is from today, it does not reflect new polling from today.

Here’s the tabloid view, then and now:

Shut down: Freedom of Information Act requests.

The justice department claims it can’t meet FOIA deadlines in an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit over phone metadata collection because of the shutdown, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports:

Just hours after the partial government shutdown kicked in, Justice Department lawyers filed a motion Tuesday morning with a federal judge in Oakland, Calif. seeking to postpone all deadlines in connection with a suit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The motion submitted to U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers (and posted here) says the government will be unable to continue reviewing documents for release because both DOJ lawyers and intelligence community personnel involved in the process are being furloughed.

Read the full piece here.

Senate minority whip John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, says Democrats are “whistling past the graveyard” in asserting that the Affordable Care Act is not negotiable:

“This is the law of the land. It’s perfect. Couldn’t be better,” Cornyn, on the Senate floor, ridicules his Democratic colleagues as saying. “That’s like whistling past the graveyard.”

Then Cornyn accuses Democrats of engineering the shutdown because polls show Republicans will take the blame:

They’re looking at polls…They’re willing to risk shutdown of the federal government just to gain political advantage… The Democrats have doubled down on their strategy, hoping to gain political advantage at the expense of people hurt.

Part of the difficulty this morning for 2m federal workers is that many did not find out until they showed up for work as usual whether they were part of the “essential” core that would be kept on the job. Some were told to stay. Others were sent home.

The Guardian’s Paul Lewis (@PaulLewis) and Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) are watching the shutdown unfold in Washington:

Some federal workers were reportedly instructed to switch off their BlackBerry smartphones to prevent them from working remotely, a disciplinary offence.

From 7am, forlorn-looking commuters could be seen heading to government buildings and agencies across Washington DC, where they would learn their fate. The city, where the government is a huge employer, will feel the impact of the federal shutdown more acutely than anywhere else in the US. The White House said it estimates a one-week shutdown would cost the wider US economy $10bn.

Read the full piece here.

Dan also has the inside story of how the shutdown played out in the halls of Congress last night:

Unfortunately, much of Washington acted as if it had seen this movie before. The metaphorical tumbleweed blowing down the corridors of Capitol Hill reflected not a fear of being caught in the crossfire, but a cynical war-weariness that left many lawmakers on the sidelines until it was too late. After three years of similar standoffs over the federal budget that were resolved at the last minute, no one could quite believe that this one would finish with shots fired.

Read the full story here.

The Senate has killed the House GOP request for a budget conference, again along party lines, 54-46.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid is on the floor of the Senate decrying the House request as a cynical 11th-hour ploy meant to portray the GOP as being serious about making a budget deal when in fact the party has, Reid says, ignored six months’ worth of Senate requests for a conference. Here’s Reid:

Sen. Murray [Patty Murray, D-Washington, budget committee chairwoman] has asked to go to conference 18 times. [McCain] has asked eight times himself. This has gone on for six months.

But it’s a clock tick past midnight… Boehner demanded the very conference they shunned us with for six months.

This display I hope would be embarrassing for House Republicans and Senate Republicans… what a deal!

If the House passes the piece of legislation they have over there… to reopen government, we’re happy to go to conference – why wouldn’t we? We’ve been asking to do that for months and months.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, sees the shutdown as a boon to the president because it distracts from the administration’s woes elsewhere:

“Obamacare is going to have a lot of problems in its rollout… the president’s poll numbers are falling in every category,” McCain told MSNBC. “Yet the story to the American people is Republicans are fighting Republicans – that’s not helpful.”

The president plans to make a statement today at 12.25pm ET in the Rose Garden, the White House advises.

As the two parties try to reach a spending agreement, they also are trying to pin the blame for the shutdown on the other side. In a statement in the briefing room yesterday afternoon the president said Republican maneuvers resulting in a government shutdown would be the “height of irresponsibility.” Expect the president to expand on that theme this afternoon.

Last time the government shut down, the Republican Congress caught the blame and the Democratic president emerged the stronger. That fact is not lost on the Obama administration, which is using president Clinton’s playbook, Bloomberg reports:

Five administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and budget director Sylvia Burwell, were central figures during the shutdowns of 1995 and 1996. That two-stage battle pitted a House Republican majority against Democratic President Bill Clinton and resulted in a public relations defeat for the Republicans.

Now, Like Clinton, Obama is casting his Republican rivals as partisan warriors willing to put the country’s economic future at risk to score political points with their base.

While Clinton chided Republicans for putting “ideology ahead of common sense” in a 1995 address, Obama told reporters yesterday that “House Republicans continue to tie funding of the government to ideological demands.”

Read the full piece here.

Are you a federal employee forced to stay home because of the shutdown? Is one of your family members an essential employee who has to work without pay? We want to hear from you:

* Where do you work? What is your role?

* What have your supervisors told you to expect in coming weeks? Please be specific. How will furloughs or payment delays affect you and/or your family?

* Is there anything you’d say to members of Congress? to President Obama or House Speaker John Boehner? Do you see the shutdown as necessary? Is there a silver lining?

Please share your views in the comments or reach out to us directly at ruth [dot] spencer [at] theguardian [dot] com. We’ll be featuring your comments here. Thanks for writing!

Welcome to our live blog coverage of the partial government shutdown, which went into effect at midnight. America is waking up to shuttered parks, silent call centers for veterans’ services, empty Pentagon offices and skeleton crews in White House and congressional offices. It’s the first government shutdown in 17 years.

The president signed a bill late on Monday defending against one of the most painful effects of a shutdown: the bill ensured there would be no delay in delivering paychecks to active-duty military personnel. The core services of other big government programs, including Medicare and social security, were expected to operate as usual.

The House and Senate played ping-pong on Monday with stopgap spending resolutions that would have kept the government open if they were able to agree on one. The last House resolution retained delays in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act that the Senate leadership had made clear would be rejected. The resolution was rejected, and at about 11.40pm ET the office of management of the budget sent out a memo ordering agencies to “execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations.” Read Jim Newell’s play-by-play of last night’s action here, and Graeme Wearden’s early-morning updates here.

Just before the shutdown, House Republicans made a significant move on the overall budget issue, electing to join a conference with the Senate to cut an actual budget deal, a step the House leadership had been resisting. Senate majority leader Harry Reid said he would not bargain over the current spending measure at a budget conference.