Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Sides dig in as shutdown in week 4
WASHINGTON — The longest federal government shutdown in U. S. history ground into a fourth week Saturday with President Donald Trump showing fresh defiance on Twitter, congressional Democrats firmly resolved to resist his calls for a border wall, and unpaid workers caught in the middle.
“We will be out for a long time unless the Democrats come back from their ‘vacations’ and get back to work,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “I am in the White House ready to sign!”
Trump’s statements came a day after some 800,000 federal employees missed expected paychecks, and after he tamped down speculation that he might declare a national emergency to begin construction on his wall and break the impasse. Instead, he told reporters Friday, “we want Congress to do its job.”
Meanwhile, many lawmakers were back home hearing from frustrated constituents, including Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, who held town-hall meetings Saturday in southeastern Pennsylvania.
There, she said in an interview, she heard from a young schoolteacher afraid the food bank would no longer be able to offer meals for her students, the operator of a federally funded women’s shelter that is now having to turn people away, and a tax preparer who could not begin securing refunds for her indigent clients because the IRS had not made the necessary software available.
“It’s disappointing to say the least, because the things that I ran on and that many of the people who just came into this Congress ran on, are getting lost in this nonsense,” Houlahan said. “Things that we were brought to Congress to do — like health care, like reforming the way our government works — we’d very much like to get to soon.”
While they may never be precisely calculated, the costs of the shutdown are likely already into the billions, and they continue to mount.
President Barack Obama’s administration estimated the direct costs of the two-week October 2013 shutdown at $2.5 billion, while estimating another $2 billion to $6 billion in lost economic output.
About 800,000 workers missed paychecks Friday, many receiving blank pay statements. Some posted photos of their empty earnings statements on social media as a rallying cry to end the shutdown.
Federal workers who have had to work without pay have started going to the courts to challenge the shutdown.
In one major action, five federal employee unions representing a combined 244,000 members working in coastal Virginia, Southern California, central Montana and the Washington area filed suit Friday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, demanding full compensation for time and overtime worked over the three weeks of the shutdown.
“This lawsuit is not complicated: We do not believe it is lawful to compel a person to work without paying them,” said Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, one of the groups suing. “With this lawsuit we’re saying, ‘No, you can’t pay workers with IOUs. That will not work for us.”
While no previous lawsuit has forced the government to pay employees during a shutdown, a Federal Claims judge ruled in 2017 that some federal employees were entitled to damages for the delay in their paychecks.
Congress on Friday passed legislation to guarantee backpay for all workers affected by the shutdown — both those who have been furloughed and those who have continued working as personnel deemed essential to the protection of life and property. Trump said Friday that he would sign it.
U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Saturday that American diplomats are upbeat despite the shutdown that has left many of them working without pay.
“Morale is good,” Pompeo told reporters in Abu Dhabi, one of the stops on his nine-nation tour of the Middle East. “They understand that there are squabbles in Washington, but their mission remains, their duties continue and they’re executing them.”
“We’re doing our best to make sure it doesn’t impact our diplomacy,” he said of the shutdown.
Almost half of the State Department employees in the United States and about one-quarter abroad have been furloughed during the shutdown. With the exception of certain local employees overseas, the rest are working without pay, including those supporting Pompeo’s trip.
Pompeo said he still plans to host all U.S. ambassadors for a previously scheduled conference in Washington this week.
“It’s something that we’ve had teed up for a while,” he said. “It is incredibly important that they hear directly from me. It’s an important opportunity for me to get in front of 180-plus of my commanders in the field to look them in the eye and describe to them what it is we’re doing and how it is I expect them to do that.”
‘I WON THE ELECTION’
In his tweets Saturday, Trump reacted sharply to a televised comment that he lacks a strategy for ending the shutdown. The tweets came shortly after an NBC Today panel with network reporters Peter Alexander and Kristen Welker, as well as Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker discussed the topic.
“I do have a plan on the Shutdown,” he said. “But to understand that plan you would have to understand the fact that I won the election, and I promised safety and security for the American people. Part of that promise was a Wall at the Southern Border. Elections have consequences!”
Before lawmakers left Washington on Friday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., attempted to make a similar point about the 2016 election in a floor exchange with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
“He was elected by the American people as president to carry out border security and build a wall,” Scalise said. “It was part of the national debate. I know some people on your side don’t even want to recognize that that election occurred and the result. But it happened.”
Replied Hoyer, “Oh no, I think there was an election, and he did raise that question. And as I recall, that’s why I’m the majority leader and you’re the minority whip.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D- Calif., called the record-breaking duration of the shutdown “unfortunate” and “totally unnecessary.” Pelosi sent a letter to colleagues late Friday thanking House Democrats for passing bills to reopen shuttered departments and agencies. Pelosi said there’s “no excuse for President Trump to keep government shut down over his demands for an ineffective, wasteful wall.”
None of the bills have included the wall money Trump is demanding. More such votes are expected this week.
“We have given many paths to alleviating this, opening up government,” Pelosi said. But Trump has made clear he will not sign the bills the House is passing, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says he will not have the Senate act on any spending legislation Trump won’t sign.
While a few Republicans have called for a truce — Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., for instance, on Friday proposed immediately reopening the government for three weeks while lawmakers and Trump hash out a compromise on the border — most are putting the onus on Democrats to budge.
“There’s a way to get this done — you just have to have the will of both the minority leader in the Senate and the speaker of the House to come to the table, and they are not yet willing to do that,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., referring to Pelosi and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who speaks to Trump frequently, said that unless Republicans and Democrats strike an unlikely compromise, “I fully expect him to declare a national emergency.”
“Most conservatives want it to be the last resort he would use,” Meadows said. “But those same conservatives, I’m sure if it’s deployed, would embrace him as having done all he could do to negotiate with Democrats.”
Many Democrats, meanwhile, say they have little reason to give in to Trump’s demand for border-wall funding since taking control of the House in the midterm elections.
“The American people gave us the majority based on our comprehensive approach to this problem and they rejected President Trump’s,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.
“My constituents understand who has triggered this, and they continue to hold him responsible, and that is Donald J. Trump,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., who represents a suburban Washington district with tens of thousands of federal workers. “They’re very clear about that. I mean, there’s no faux equivalency here, like, ‘You’re equally to blame.’ They get it.”
Other lawmakers said they were solely focused on breaking the impasse and ending disruptions in their home districts.
Rep. Anthony Brindisi, D-N.Y., who was sworn into Congress this month after serving more than seven years in the state assembly, said his office is taking calls from unpaid food and drug inspectors, among other affected constituents.
“I’m someone who is used to getting things done, so it is very frustrating,” he said. “Look, let’s get the government up and running. I am for border security — I believe that some element of physical barrier makes sense, but that can’t be the only solution.”
Information for this article was contributed by Mike DeBonis, Darryl Fears, Ashley Halsey III, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Seung Min Kim and Erica Werner of The Washington Post; and by Jonathan Lemire, Lisa Mascaro, Jill Colvin, Catherine Lucey, Colleen Long, Alan Fram, Lolita Baldor, Darlene Superville, Zeke Miller, Laurie Kellman and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.