End the shutdown

Federal employees forced to financial brink by a politically bankrupt president.

One of the hardest jobs on the planet has to be a prison guard. It’s thankless. It’s stressful. It’s dangerous. And the people you’re locked up with all day aren’t exactly glad to see you.

“Nobody in prison is happy,” Marjorie Meyers, Houston-based federal public defender, told the board recently. “And they take that out sometimes on the guards.”

Well, now Washington is taking it out on them, too.

During what has become the longest federal shutdown in American history, corrections officers are among the essential federal employees who are required to keep working. They must keep suiting up and covering the grueling shifts day and night, week after week — for free.

President Donald Trump has expressed confidence that the 800,000 federal workers across country missing paychecks as part of the government shutdown will be just fine.

“I’m sure the people that are on the receiving end will make adjustments; they always do,” Trump said recently as he headed for Camp David.

Spoken like a man who has filed for bankruptcy six times.

The president, who has also said he is “proud” to shut down the government for border security, insists “many” unpaid federal workers “agree 100 percent with what I’m doing.”

Many don’t, as federal employee unions have made clear. The shutdown is affecting employees ranging from air-traffic controllers to border agents to NASA scientists. Meyers, the public defender whose office hasn’t been affected by the shutdown yet, is fearful that for the first time in history, the judiciary will go unpaid as well: “I think people are really angry,” she said. “They feel like we’re hostages to this. Just open the government and figure it out.”

It’s easy to forget, amid the drama of Trump’s bloviating, his prime time speech, the turn-by-turn TV coverage of his futile negotiations with Democrats, that real people are suffering behind the scenes.

People like Linda Hernandez, a mother supporting two kids and a grandchild who isn’t getting paid for either of her two jobs — one as a secretary at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Houston and the other as an overtime corrections officer. Hernandez is one of 30,000 federal employees in Houston who missed a paycheck Friday and the soonest she could see another is Jan. 25.

“With kids to support, as a mother, you feel like you let them down. Emotionally, I’m just drained,” Hernandez was quoted saying in a story last week by the Chronicle’s Erin Douglas and Alex Stuckey.

It is not Hernandez who is letting her family down. It is the failed leaders in Washington — mostly from President Trump, who seems quite content to hurt hundreds of thousands of hardworking Americans to build a border wall that polls show Americans don’t want anyway.

The wall is not needed when illegal crossings are at their lowest levels in decades. The wall will do little to address the only real crisis — the humanitarian one largely of Trump’s own making as he fails to adequately respond to the huddled masses of women and children seeking asylum on our southern border.

But amid the policy debates, we must remember: Individual workers being played like pawns in a cynical game locked in stalemate.

Americans who support the shutdown and Congressional leaders who enable it with silence and inaction, we ask you: is it worth it?

Is it worth it to force federal employees like Hernandez and their families to dip into savings, to borrow from relatives?

Is it worth it to leave them struggling to pay rent and mortgages? Groceries? Doctor bills? Credit card interest payments?

Is it worth it, under the auspices of national security, to punish families of military service members whose job is to protect national security?

“Frankly, I am exhausted, stressed, and emotionally drained by our current political climate, but if you were to ask my husband what I’ve said to him when he’s called every night, he would tell you I’ve said, ‘We are fine,’ ” Natalie Daniels, whose husband is stationed in San Diego with the U.S. Coast Guard, told the Washington Post. “That’s how a military spouse supports her husband, and that is how a military spouse supports their country.”

Is this how her country supports her, her husband and her four children?

The other day, some likely well-intentioned individual at the Coast Guard provided employees a tip sheet on how to survive the shutdown. Consider holding a garage sale, it advised, or dog-walking, or serving as a “mystery shopper.”

One other piece of advice: “Bankruptcy is the last option,” it read.

For responsible people, yes. For Washington these days, bankrupt politics seem to be the only option.

This disgraceful fiasco is not leadership. It is not governing. Mr. President, it is nothing to be proud of. It is a callous exercise devoid of wisdom, of skill, or even of conscience.

We must support our fellow Americans. They work for us. Contact your congressional representatives and order them to shut down this shutdown.