Trump defiant as shutdown enters week 4

WASHINGTON — The longest federal government shutdown in American 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 an expected paycheck 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.”

Federal workers who have been forced to work without pay have started going to the courts to challenge the shutdown.

The National Federation of Federal Employees, National Association of Government Employees, the National Weather Service Employees Organization and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — 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,” the federation’s president, Randy Erwin, said in a statement. “With this lawsuit we’re saying, ‘No, you can’t pay workers with I.O.U.s. That will not work for us.’ ”

Congress on Friday passed legislation to guarantee back pay 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. The White House has not indicated whether Trump would sign it.

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!”

He did not tip his hand on whether he will move ahead with an emergency declaration that could break the impasse. A day earlier, he said he was not ready to do it “right now.”

An emergency declaration could let him use existing, unspent money to build the U.S.Mexico border wall, without needing congressional approval. Democrats oppose that step but may be unable to stop it. Many Republicans are wary, too.