Originally published at: 5 Points on the Trump Admin’s Threatened—And Real—Government Shutdown Layoffs
In an effort to try and make good on their threats and to put more pressure on congressional Democrats, Trump administration departments and agencies laid off around 4,000 federal employees at the end of last week. President Donald Trump himself has threatened more layoffs to come. The Office of Management and Budget called it a…
Russell Vought needs to spend a lot of time in prison for what he’s inflicted on the U.S. What he has done is essentially fraud, so he needs to be convicted on multiple counts of defrauding the US, and to then serve the sentences concurrently.
Throw some of his co-conspirators in there too.
Oh, yes, cat:
10 Likes
Democrats just need to stay in Washington and keep telling the media that they are in the Capitol, they are working every day, and when the Republicans get out of the clown car and return to Washington, Democrats are ready to continue working on a budget that benefits the American people and protects their healthcare.
8 Likes
Trump thinks he can run the government with only ICE and the military getting paychecks. Keep it closed and ….. as Trump says .. ‘see what happens.’ Add a demand to pay everyone back pay and rehire the RIFs.
8 Likes
The legality of this latest round of layoffs is still in question. Even before the RIF notices went out on Friday, unions representing federal employees — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — have already filed a suit to halt the layoffs, claiming that RIFs during a shutdown is unlawful and violates the Anti-Deficiency Act.
Not in question, straight up illegal. The Anti-Deficiency Act says the executive can’t obligate funds in excess of the Congressional appropriations for that year. There currently isn’t a Congressional appropriations for this year, so they can’t spend money on the RIF process.
If the Trump regime did the RIFs on September 30th, it would have been legal. But after October 1st, without a new appropriations from Congress, it’s illegal. Even if the SCOTUS ultimately betrays us again by siding with Trump’s illegal acts, that does not make them any less illegal now.
10 Likes
It was a breath of fresh air to read Patty Murray calling them “crooks.” Hopefully this will catch on and they will begin to call them what they really are – fascists.
8 Likes
*No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers — they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said
This is an excellent way of phrasing the message; Dems take heed! Also, observing that if Republicans required that the government be “open before they could talk”, they had several months of it, and yet only caucused with their lord and master, Trump.
1 Like
Don’t you mean serve the sentences “consecutively”? I can’t think of a single reason under the sun to reduce his time in captivity.
2 Likes
Trying to blame the job and program cuts on Democrats is a silly and futile gesture - no one on the left or center-left believes Trump wasn’t going to lay these people off and cancel these programs anyway; and to the extent the right even cares what the reason is, they probably think Trump and Vought look weak for not gloating even more, and for blaming Democrats instead of bragging about how they were gonna do it anyway.
The legality of this latest round of layoffs is still in question.
I suspect that when it gets to court, the Trump administration will simply argue that, yes, they were gonna do it anyway, so the fact that the government was closed at the time doesn’t matter.
Sadly, I can see most of the GOP-appointed judges enthusiastically caving to that argument instead of applying the laws as written.
No reason they can’t really be both. I mean crime and fascism kind of go hand in hand, like peanut butter & jelly, or Epstein & Maxwell.
1 Like
That’s exactly what I meant, and I can’t even blame autocorrect. D’oh!