His salary would continue for the rest of his term as long as he does not resign or is removed by the House. As long as he continues to record a vote on committee markup or House session days (and since the start of Covid he can do that remotely or by proxy, respectively; the House has refused to reinstate mandatory presence) he is considered in attendance.
Congress does not get a BAQ so no budget for “housing”.
Nothing in the rules as far as I can see mandates that a member keep open a full time office receiving public. If other similar public offices are a guide, employees who remain on the payroll and showing up continue to get paid, subject of course to whatever penalties of law if it turns out they are faking their attendance or engaging in non-Congress activites when they’re supposed to be on the job (so the press may want to ask House Payroll if there are people claiming to be working); and the official expenses allowance would just sit there awaiting a valid charge being submitted (and with only a few months to go on the lease on the district office space the termination penalty and the remaining rent may be a wash).
From what I can find, members of Congress get an allowance (over and above their salary) for office staff and expenses. If Cawthorn has shut down his office and dismissed the staff, it’s fair to ask if he’s still receiving the allowance.
Right. The allowance is not paid in cash to him, it’s an account against which to submit invoices. Mind you, he could get creative about what to charge and he would be the guy to try and buy a thousand souvenir pen holders with the office credit card to resell for a profit…
Yep, and those invoices are subject to approval by the Chief Administrative Officer of the House. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she had been told to slow roll any requests coming out of Cawthorn’s office.
I, a district-11 constituent, am so glad to see the end of Mad Caw.
As irresponsible as it is for him to abandon his job like that, he wasn’t doing his job anyway. It’s like when the firefighter who keeps setting fires around town finally leaves the station and never shows up for his shift, you can’t get that upset over the dereliction of duty.
His successor, Chuck Edwards, has picked up the job. He’s a state legislator, but he’s offered to help all district-11 constituents with any federal services they need, to the best of his abilities, until he formally assumes the offices.
Edwards is awful. He’s a deeply conservative, culture-war Republican with whom I disagree on just about every issue. But if I could vote for him purely as a public servant, based on his competence and intelligence and willingness to do the work, he’d have my vote in a heartbeat. He’s politically terrible, but bureaucratically excellent.
Cawthorn (and others of his ilk) see their post and job more as that of an “influencer” who is so popular they get rewarded with a regular salary, fancy office, very good health insurance and people being required to address them respectfully, in exchange for voting for whatever the R proposal is — much as would some other influencer get paid or comped at shops for product-placing Spaghetti Scametti watches in their social media cat vids and rants about 5G. And they see it as something to cash in on now. The notion of the regular work of Representative being an actual public servicecareer they can build and should protect is not in their conceptual language.
This is what it looks like when you’re so insecure of tour masculinity that you feel the need to build your entire outward-facing persona towards showing everyone what a Big Manly Man you are.
Yes, I think this every time Nick Adams or someone of that ilk starts spouting off about “alpha males” and suchlike. If you spend that much of your time worrying about whether other men find you sufficiently manly, you’ve already lost the battle you’re trying to win.
Totally surreal to see this guy or something like Tucker Carlson having opinions about masculinity. As the saying goes: they should stay in their lane.
Tucker probably also doesn’t have a problem with hard metrosexuals. Specifically, the ones that care a lot about full-body fitness including testicular tanning.
His is out of his league. He, like all of us, suffered some blows in life. In his case, they scared him in ways that make him cynical and self-serving. More worthy of pity than anything else.
By that standard, there are pretty much no evil people then? We can lie, cheat, threaten, abuse and put others at risk and always blame it on bad times in our lives. We can materially detriment people across the nation in search of our self-serving goals and it’s just worthy of pity?
No. We have plenty of self-serving, cynical individuals out there who look out for themselves first, and yeah, that may be worth of a certain degree of pity for their lack of affect. When they then take it and spread the damage of their own selfish nature over others sympathy is the wrong choice. Making sure they understand the consequences - legal, social, political, is the better move for both that individual and those around them.
