It’ll probably take longer than 2 weeks for the signs to become noticeable. They can quit, but they can’t refuse to come to work. They can be reprimanded and fired if they do. Striking is illegal.
Yes, it’s unfair. I suspect that some will just quit. It’ll be a few here and a few there in the next couple of weeks. It’ll become more noticeable after another month.
The Republicans have trapped themselves into governing according to what Rush Limbaugh blithers on about on his daily talk show.
Aye; it’s really the only way to interpret the question posed. I mean, the thread title isn’t “how much longer do you think the US government shutdown will last?”.
They can be sick an inordinate amount of the time, which has more or less the same effect as a strike. (Weaker, but the same idea.) But it’s hard to prove that a particular individual was abusing his/her SL, and if you can’t do that, you can’t fire or reprimand them.
I’m not sure what point you are making with that graph. If the government is in shut down private contractors will not get paid any more than federal employees would.
Can’t have that… sounds too much like compromise and old-time politics.
Nope, the GOP has kind of hung their hat on giving no concessions and being as obstinate as possible about that kind of thing. It’s like they think that giving in on the DACA stuff to win for the wall is somehow losing, even though it’s exactly the sort of political horse trading that the system is built on and expects to happen.
His belief is that private security is better than any level of big-government police. When seconds count, Wackin’Hump Security is only minutes away, but if you survive the incident you can always contract with their competitor (penalties will apply for early contract termination; Wackin’Hump Security is a division of BigMonopoly Protection Racket Inc.).
According to contract, air traffic controllers can be out sick up to four days in a row without a “doctor’s note.” More time than that, management can require medical proof of your illness.
If sick leave abuse is suspected, even before that threshold, then there are things management can do to keep a tighter rein on that individual, such as requiring a doctor’s note for any amount of requested sick leave. But … those procedures take time to implement; they have a fairly high threshold before being instituted; and right now, there are no facility managers or administrative personnel reporting to duty at air traffic facilities. Only controllers and first-level supervisors are actually working, so there’s really not anyone available to actually implement these procedures.
So expect more controllers to come down with something, particularly since they’re now actually missing a paycheck.
Source: I was an air traffic controller for over 27 years. I retired just before Christmas, which turned out to be fantastic timing.
And the talk that’s making me endlessly mad now is the GOP talking point of “The Democrats won’t even negotiate!”
When your bargaining position is “We won’t even consider your point (re-opening government) until you grant our point ($5.7 billion for the Wall),” it’s absolute bullshit to claim it’s the other side that’s failing to negotiate. I personally think the Democratic offer to fund everything except DHS for the rest of the year and have talks about DHS funding is very reasonable (Transportation, Agriculture, National Parks have no direct connection to border security, why are they being punished?), but I do understand the concept of leverage.
Especially when the Democrats already, earlier this year, offered exactly what Trump wants, in exchange for a continuation of a policy that’s popular among something like 80% of the population, and that still wasn’t good enough. What the heck do Republicans think negotiation looks like?
Let me just add to this that, under a shutdown, there’s technically no such thing as “approved leave,” sick or otherwise. You’re considered essential, you’re supposed to be at work, no time off for vacations or kid’s events or funerals or being sick. You’d technically be put on “furlough” status if you were actually incapacitated for work - which means there’s no guarantee you’d get paid for that time. You know you’ll eventually get paid for what you work during a shutdown, but if you missed any time during that, it literally takes an act of Congress to restore your pay for “furlough” time. That’s exactly the same situation “non-essential” furloughed workers are in - they have to rely on Congress making them whole for the time they were prevented from working.
That has been granted in all previous shutdowns, and the Senate has passed a bill ensuring that this time - but it’s never guaranteed. Think about being furloughed weeks or even months without the certainty of getting any income for that time - that’s what shutdowns do.
I have hit this point: I just called my state’s senior US Senator and said they need to pass the resolution that passed in the House. “The President has had his tantrum,” said I. “A lot of people here rely on SNAP & WIC. You’re about to have an air travel crisis. The wall is not getting built this Congress. I expect to see the government up & running Monday, or this becomes about you-all, and what we start saying about you.”
McConnell has been drawing fire on this too long. I want my Senators to know I hold them responsible.
I haven’t looked up the new junior Senator’s number yet, but I may leave a stern phone message this evening.
I’m becoming certain by the minute we will see the President declare a national emergency at any moment and fund the wall that way. As I understand it such an action would basically end the shutdown since Congress would then pass a bill to fund the government and Trump would be willing to sign it. I expect something like this will happen no later than Monday.
And then the court fight will begin.
Complete capitulation to their demands.
So, as I see it, the Democrats understand that you don’t reward a toddler for having a tantrum. They know Trump claimed responsibility for the shutdown, they know red states are the biggest federal aid consumers, they know most Americans think Trump and his wall are stupid. They have no reason to capitulate (but never put it past Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).
On the other hand, Trump. He’s a raging narcissist, and saving face is his utmost priority. But he’s a dumbshit as dealmaker and he’s left himself no face-saving exit (though I guess burning the boats is a kind of strategy). Without at least a billion in funding, I can’t imagine an exit strategy that leaves his fragile manbaby ego intact.
Actually I can imagine it - he just lies to his base and says he won, just like he said his unratified USMCA deal would make Mexico pay for the wall. It’s not like Rush Limbaugh is suddenly going to become a fact-checker. His fans eat up this bullshit like it’s gummy bears. I’m baffled why Trump hasn’t already done this.
So what I’m trying to say is ‘how long will this shutdown last’ is a question best applied to normal political staring contests, which this is not. This is a pivotal question for a presidency and a nation, so to my mind the important question is more how will it go down than when. And my answer is I have no clue. But I chose 1-2 years.
Like when there’s a SWAT team outside, and you have a knife up to your hostage’s throat. Negotiation.
I think it will be 1-2 more weeks.
Trump has gotten himself in the history books as having the longest best ever bigly shutdown. So there that’s one more feather in his cap, but its got to be clear even to him that just saying “gimme wall” over and over again isn’t going to work. His next strategy is to threaten to use emergency powers in the hope that that will intimidate the Dems into submission. When that doesn’t work I think he will have painted himself in a corner to the point that he’ll have to go through with it. At which point he’ll declare victory and let a the same bill he agreed to in mid December actually go through.
An A for effort, but your blue state senator already gets it, but your red state senator relishes the possibility of a shrunken federal workforce. Plus it slows the work of the Department of Justice, the EPA, and things stuff like that. Trump has no reason to deal. If he wanted to end the shutdown…he probably never would have had one in the first place.
Trump doesn’t really know what the fuck he wants - other than tormenting his perceived enemies. There should be a way out of the trade war, but there isn’t because he doesn’t know what he wants. It’s the same with other shit that he’s tried to make a deal on. He’s only going to be more unhinged.
Aaaaaand after a day of having a whole bunch of folks explain why this would be a bad precedent and big bad dumb solution, the President has backed away from the idea of declaring a national emergency.
…Sarah Kendzior characterized the shutdown as a “hostile restructuring.” And I think that’s a much more accurate way of describing what we are seeing here.
The events of the last couple of years have moved so quickly lets not forget the early days of the administration. Steve Bannon. Bannon is a believer in “The Fourth Turning.”
The goal is to break the system. To bring it to its knees. In the early days of the administration we saw how they approached this: either getting rid of or marginalising the “smart” people and the people not loyal to Trump. Leaving important posts unfilled and departments woefully understaffed. I said at the time that this wouldn’t break the Federal Government. The Federal Government is a huge chaotic “machine” that thunders along like a runaway railway-train. But things would slip through the cracks. Not everything that “used to be done” would get done. Corners would be cut. As anyone who have had to work in situations where you are understaffed and under-resourced we know this would be inevitable.
And the shut-down is merely another phase in the “stealth civil war.” Because the reality is that WillFarnaby is not alone in his opinions. And in an administration that allowed Michael Wolff to just hang out at the White House, that was unable to stop Omarosa from covertly recording private and confidential encounters, it is very easy to imagine that there are plenty of people running wild in the WH that share WillFarnaby’s views.
It doesn’t matter that Bannon’s no longer there. His surrogates, like Stephen Miller, are still there and are key in everything that we are seeing happening. Putin wants to break everything as well. And there are others in the administration who just want to make money. Its a perfect storm of evil people with different motivations who have figured out how to take advantage of the stupidest person on the planet to wreck havoc with the most powerful country in the world.
So how long will this last?
I’m too scared to make a prediction. The best case scenario IMHO is a couple of weeks-to-a-month from now. For a quick resolution to the shutdown it relies on Republicans putting pressure on McConnell, it needs for someone to figure out a way to give Trump a win without actually giving him anything. Trump is the wildcard. He is thick-as-shit and does whatever the last-person tells him to do. So this could all be over with a single tweet.
Here’s what I’m imagining the worst case scenario is.
The shutdown continues. The news cycle moves on. People stop paying attention.
Law suits start. The administration looses, maybe they start limited payroll. Or they start to look at ways of replacing federal employees with contractors. They start to sell off the national parks, increase privatization. WillFarnaby is our guide on what they plan to do, just read his posts to get an insight into how they think.
Trump wants his wall. The goal of everyone else is to break things, to destabilize America, to make money. Looking at it from a distance its fascinating to watch, in a very morbid sense. If you wanted to take over the United States you wouldn’t do it with an army: you would do it with a plan as utterly preposterous as this. So in the worst case scenario when would it end? It wouldn’t. It would evolve, the administration would “rebrand” the shutdown, ignore the law, a new crisis will be introduced, the media moves on, and our perception of what is and isn’t “normal” shifts yet again.
I’m picking and hoping for some variation of the best case scenario. But the longer this drags out the happier people like Bannon will be. This is everything he’s been dreaming of and more, and it takes him one step closer to his goal.
Question is, was he really convinced it was a bad idea, or is he just enjoying all the drama and attention that this shutdown is generating, and wants to prolong it?