Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.
“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”
Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
They should propose a bill that makes a lapse in appropriations trigger a CR so there’s no need for a shutdown.
What is CR in this context?
Continuing resolution. Basically if they can’t make a new budget the old one gets used.
… kinda like every other sensible nation ON EARTH. Sigh.
Not really.
In Canada and other parliamentary type systems, failing to pass a budget triggers an election.
Good point. That definitely disrupts things to some extent – but the government doesn’t literally stop everything, AFAIK. Don’t departments still get their funding throughout, until the new government passes another budget?
No, you are right, things don’t just stop when that happens. I imagine funding could lapse if it was about to lapse, but just because there isn’t a budget passed yet doesn’t mean its immediately going to lapse.
If we somehow had a budget fail, and for some reason took 6 months to have an election (would never happen), we might run into funding issues?
Didn’t have that until a decade or so back? Thought I remembered we switched to this system so Republicans could reevaluate each time/hold everything hostage…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States#Overview
Shutdowns have occurred since 1980 when the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that government operations need to cease in a lapse of appropriations to prevent violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. I believe the opinion was rendered during the Carter Administration.
Ah, thanks for the correction!
Hey, no worries. That’s how we all grow. I’m wrong all the fucking time.
My people. I love being wrong, someone always corrects me, and then I learn something.
Kinda weird that’s not already the default behavior.
Not really. You’re coming at it assuming the point of the system is to benefit the majority of the people. It is not., and the people who do benefit have a vested interest in ensuring things do not change.
And things ended up this way because in 1776 they had little idea of how their rules were going to play out but they had to choose something to get started and they hoped it would get fixed with time.
Leadership believes they would be unable to cobble together enough votes to pass a budget if there wasn’t the threat of a shutdown to hang over the Representatives.
Voters in the US tend to elect Representatives who are unwilling to compromise. Being obstructionist is rewarded with way better re-election chances than getting anything done. Voters want to see their candidate Stand Up To The Enemy, although they will accept passage of a Perfect Bill (as annointed by their media of choice). Passing a bill that is later deemed by their media of choice to have any small non-perfection gets them primaried and booted. So any candidate that doesn’t have extensive cover for passing a budget, that by its nature has to be a compromise, is replaced by a more obstructionist person.