Last week, the administration said customary shutdown policies will be reversed to make the money available and refund payments on time possible.
If the gov’t isn’t funded, from whence do refunds come?
Or do the checks bounce like they did for his failing businesses?
Tantrums can be sanitized, too.
Didn’t the Thirteenth Amendment abolish involuntary servitude?
These people need a union.
Wait, did I miss the repeal of the 13th Amendment? It’s not even indentured servitude, since these folks haven’t done anything to become indentured.
Great news! You’re going back to work! One small catch though…
The GOP is bringing back slavery!
Well, there’s a case to be made that America was Great back around the same time that Slavery was still in existence.
So it’s all in line with MAGA!
But I thought we didn’t need all these useless government employees?
Oh, right, it’s only the government employees that are doing something for someone ELSE that are useless.
Those who are doing something to help me, personally, and right at this minute, are essential.
Only racists make that case!
MARA!
Republicans can’t do anything right but clearly seem content to look like incompetent fools.
I don’t know what is more ridiculous: Trump saying we will get our refund money even though there isn’t any funds available during a shutdown or that those workers being recalled to process them are happy working with no pay? This is the worst GOP Kabuki Theater yet.
While It may be one step ahead of the Brexit debacle, Putin must be splitting at the seams laughing over all this “stable genius” conservative policy on both sides of The Pond. He and the conservatives who played along with him must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. We need to think past the indictments and look at getting our revenge on Russia.
Republicans can’t do anything right but seem content to look like incompetent fools.
It’s probably a good thing that Block and TurboTax have begun hiring their own CPAs to help with questions on tax filings.
While I appreciate the recall of these workers, I don’t know that I would trust them to give the right answer (which is usually in doubt anyway, depending on whom you talk to) when they’re not getting paid.
It’s the same as the TSA agents who have reportedly told flyers that they don’t care about safety.
This is where we are in this mess.
This seems illegal.
We won the war against slavery. What is this s**t?!
Edit: Just emailed my US reps to protest.
Maybe they’ll start calling in sick like the TSA. And working for H&R Block instead.
Sadly, it’s not. Or at least never tested in the courts, and as late as today we had a judge say everything was fine with it…
How many of these IRS workers can afford to spend 40 hours a week working for no pay? My guess is most of them have an actual need to continually generate income. I know that during my career, if my employer had asked me to work for an indefinite period on a promise of pay to come at the end of that indefinite period, I just could not have done that.
Oh, so they can redefine what an “essential worker” is based on the political risk of pissing off Americans who don’t receive a service from the government? I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work…once again the Trump administration ignores the law and norms in its effort to prove government doesn’t work.
The chilling thing is the rising conservative talking point that the government works just fine with fewer people…besides the obvious lie due to things like this happening, some of the functions won’t demonstrate how important they are over the short term. If these assholes suddenly get it in their minds to kill things that really do critical things over months, years, or decades, they will do real damage to our system, stuff that might not be fixable without large intervention in the future. I know it’s their plan to get rid of anything that doesn’t help their narrow aims to help the 1% and corporations, but these things really matter.
How exactly is the determination made that particular employees are “essential”? The IRS is reversing itself to make people work to give out refunds, the FAA is recalling people to ensure safety, but how can they just decide at the beginning that these people are non-essential and then decide no wait, they’re essential after all?
There are rules, basically to protect life or government property, that are used as the basis for each department to decide what is essential. That’s not supposed to be modified, it is supposed to be the very basic level to keep things from deteriorating, people from dying, and that’s it. The whole idea is to conserve resources until money is available again and make sure nothing dies/blows up/etc.
I have never heard of people being reclassified as essential during a shutdown, people furloughed stayed furloughed. It’s possible it happened, like for an emergency failure, but the idea of suddenly classifying IRS agents as essential in order to keep people from getting pissed at Trump has not happened before. The political pain has been part of the push to open the government again.
It is instructive that the other shutdowns (as usual forced by Republicans) were imposed on a Democratic president, who had incentive to shut everything down to force Republicans in Congress to do their jobs. This time, a Republican president (supported by Republicans in Congress) has made the choice, and he can open things up to avoid the political pressure to reopen the entire government. It’s wrong to have all these people forced to work without pay, which should be a scandal on its own, and eventually the system will fall over because government workers can’t continue working for free indefinitely. We’d be better off if a group (say TSA agents) just said they weren’t working without pay anymore and shut down a major government function until they got paid again.