Someone in the congressional office of Rep. Angie Craig is having fun with acronyms.
On Wednesday, the Minnesota Democrat unveiled a bill taking aim at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the federal government nears a shutdown at the end of the month. Party in-fighting has left the Republican leader struggling to pass a spending plan to fund government services.
Craig’s bill would block members of Congress from receiving their scheduled pay if the government shuts down and federal workers are furloughed. She is calling the legislation the My Constituents Cannot Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act, or the MCCARTHY Shutdown Act for short.
The Democrat said her tribute to the House speaker, if passed, would make sure lawmakers experience the same lost paychecks as regular Americans.
“Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans are ready to shut down the federal government and put the livelihoods of working families at risk — while still collecting a paycheck,” Craig said in a statement. “[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”
According to the bill text, lawmakers’ pay during the shutdown period would be held in escrow until the final day of the session, when it would be released for payment so as not to violate the law prescribing congressional salaries.
Federal workers who are furloughed generally do not receive pay while the government is shut down. In the past, Congress has stepped in and passed legislation retroactively to make workers whole for the wages they lost, but the missing pay can lead to financial anxieties and hardships while the shutdown persists.
The last shutdown — dubbed a partial shutdown, since certain agencies remained open — was the longest in U.S. history, lasting 35 days from late 2018 into early 2019. The impasse stemmed from then-President Donald Trump’s demand for federal money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
During that saga, more than 100 lawmakers pledged to refuse their paychecks since the shutdown was the fault of Congress and the White House. Such proposals stretch back to at least to 2013, when some members moved to cut off Congressional salaries during a spending impasse.
This time, right-wing lawmakers are trying to pressure McCarthy into demanding spending cuts that would run counter to an agreement he made with President Joe Biden. They have threatened to oust McCarthy as speak if he doesn’t follow through.
“[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”
- Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.)
Hardliners even managed to torpedo a bill to fund the Pentagon, which is typically among the easiest to get GOP members behind.
McCarthy can lose no more than four Republican votes to get legislation passed, and it would need to be something that can clear the Senate, where Democrats hold a threadbare majority.
“I want to make sure we don’t shut down,” McCarthy told Fox News over the weekend. “I don’t think that is a win for the American public and I definitely believe it’ll make our hand weaker if we shut down.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that both chambers were being pushed around by “a small band of hard-right Republicans.”
Democracy is supposed to be majority rule. This seems broken. How can it be fixed?
As written in the constitution it was a democracy where only landowners has the franchise. After the oligarchy stopped being landed gentry and became merchants and exploitation manufacturing owners they changed it so they could buy the reps they want.
We have one party that cares about decorum but not results and another party that cares about results but not decorum. The latter is the one with the obvious advantage.
This is obsurd. Neither party gives a shit about decorum. Individuals within each party sure, but the parties couldn’t care less
Actually there were plenty of times… such as when Barack Obama legally had the authority to just push a Supreme Court Justice on through when the right refused to hold any vote.
And instead even though he had the power to do so, but not the precedent he played the game of “Let the election decide” that Mitch McConnell told him to play.
After realizing the whole thing was trick and the right was perfectly willing to do anything that they had the powers do but not the precedent, Obama doubled down and said “When they go low, we go high.”
The problem of course that the Republicans were more than happy to tell the democrats, they can go as high as they want, Republicans still keep going low if it gets results… and it does because the only opposition they have are people who think that they can shame the Devil Himself into behaving as long as they earn enough good boy points
That’s technically true, but the US was never a full democracy. It was always a Republic, with provisions for preventing what the framers called “the tyranny of the majority.” It’s just that Republicans have abandoned any pretense of civility and have chosen to game the rules ruthlessly in their bid for authoritarian power.
So for years we’ve suffered under the tyranny of the minority, which is far worse.