Campaign Action
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner represents a whole lot of federal employees. They, and he, have had enough of Republicans taking their livelihoods hostage. He's introduced legislation to end government shutdowns. And yes, it has an irritating title: the Stop Stupidity (Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage in the Coming Years) Act.
"It is disturbing that the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of workers are at the mercy of dysfunction in Washington," Warner said in a statement announcing the legislation. To protect them in the future, his bill would essentially codify continuing resolutions, so that when funding ran out, a CR would kick in automatically at current funding levels. However, it would not include legislative and executive branch funding, so that lawmakers and the president would still feel the heat and be more likely to come to agreement.
It takes the federal government employee hostage off the table, which means that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sure as hell won't bring it to the floor. But it would revert to the way government operated prior to 1980. That's the year that President Jimmy Carter's attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, interpreted Congress' constitutional power of the purse and the Antideficiency Act of 1870 to say that government could not function unless Congress explicitly paid for it. For the whole of the Carter administration, Congress had been unable to pass a budget on time, so Carter wanted to do something about it and asked for this ruling from his AG, which has been in effect since.
Little did Carter, et al., know how this power play, intended to make Congress do its job, would be used by the likes of Newt Gingrich and his Freedom Caucus descendants—much less Donald Trump in the White House. You'd think the experience of Richard Nixon would have created some awareness among Democrats of the capacity for venality in Republicans, but it seems to have taken several more decades of their shameless destruction of everything for that to really sink in.
Call your Republican senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to reopen government. Don't stop until this is over.