Can Congress do anything (except launch an oversight investigation) without having it run past the Senate and approved by the president?
Nope. Any official act needs to pass both the house and the Senate and end up on the President’s desk. He may veto it - God knows - but it still has to take that path.
They should try. I mean, they should force the Republicans to shoot down a new bill to pay federal workers every day. Why not?
Oh, hell yes. No disputing that. Put them on record as not wanting to pay people for their work. Them’s some nice optics, there.
They’ll give a fuck when they can’t fly to visit Grandma. And the vast majority of people (even on the right) will blame the government, not the workers. Whether your in rural Mississippi or the upper east side EVERYONE will be pissed off at all the branches of government.
Even the threat of that will end the shutdown
I don’t believe this is true. See, for example, the OPM Guidance on Shutdowns from 2015. “Excepted” employees (i.e., those who are working) are guaranteed to be paid when funding is restored because their agency has incurred a financial obligation to them that must be settled. (Uncertainty over when they get paid, of course, can cause a lot of anxiety).
Furloughed employees are the more interesting category. There is no obligation to pay them for the time they spent not working. In every prior shutdown they have been paid, but there is no guarantee that this will happen.
It’s an interesting question. Do you pay an employee for their work, or for being your employee?
Easy. We get Mexican ATCs to land the planes.
Brilliant! Since Mexicans are willing to work for less than Americans and the American ATCs aren’t making anything it means the Mexican ATCs would have to pay to work. And boom, Mexico just paid for the wall!
This is what I think will happen, if the shutdown lasts more than a few weeks: Federal employees will start quitting en masse. It would be the natural thing to do. If I had a job where I was expected to work without getting paid, with no prospects for getting paid indefinitely, and I had bills piling up, I would get another job that would actually pay me.
From here (graph)
In 1981, 281 million passengers were carried in the US. In 2017 it was 849 million.
In 1981 there seemed to be 12,000 ATC union members. The BLS reports 22,000 ATCs, more or less, in 2017.
So it would indeed be a nightmare.
Historical precedent:
It is amazing. When it is something conservatives oppose, even something that cost a million dollars, they yell about fiscal responsibility. But, when it is $26 BILLION for a wall it’s a “rounding error.” :rolleyes:
To repeat, about a thousand miles of the US/Mexico border is the Colorado and Rio Grande. You cannot build on someone else’s property, so this wall would end up block US citizens from access to the rivers. What is not incredibly stupid about that?
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Meanwhile, it occurs to me that the Rs have long wanted to squeeze down the government. What better way to do that, while also kneecapping the deepstate than to make federal employees want to leave? All those workers who would rather not work for him anyway will wander off, and only the people who are loyal to him will stay. What a great way to clean house.
I’m not seeing the problem. By and large, people in that region want the government to seize their lands and cut them off from the un-seized property on the other side of the wall. This is why they voted for Trump. If they didn’t want their land seized, they wouldn’t have voted for him. Shouldn’t they get what they asked for? 
Maybe not after Fox runs the following story.
Lazy spoiled elite federal workers are lying to to enable terrorists to sneak weapons on planes and prevent you from seeing your grandma and. We have video of an employee who called in “sick” yet is seen jogging, to the Whole Foods. Real American coal miners have lost their entire job, yet these government prima donnas can’t stand a mere 3 weeks off the government teet, spending your tax money on fancy tofu dogs. Is Soros behind this? Some people say yes!
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Well, the idiot did promise during his campaign that he was going to “drain the swamp”. At the time I thought he meant congress and lobbyists and such. Maybe we’re now seeing that he actually meant the entire governmental system in DC.
I’m mostly joking. I really don’t think he’s smart enough to play this much of a long game.
I’m picturing suddenly subbing in Air Force controllers in 2019 being less like doing so in 1981 (airline deregulation was only 1978) and more like the Army Air Mail fiasco of 1934. :eek:
One passenger at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Anna Gedstad, in a Sunday tweet, which has since gone viral, that a TSA agent responded to her question about removing her laptop from its case by saying, “I don’t care, I’m not getting paid.”
We don’t need no stinkin’ strike!