A plea from the federal workers’ union for Senate Democrats to fund the government fell on deaf ears Monday, as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and her colleagues continued their filibuster, blocking a continuing resolution that would restore funding.
On Monday, Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, released a statement calling the shutdown “an avoidable crisis that is harming families.”
“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” Kelley added. “Today I’m making mine: It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay — today.”
But Democrats in Congress made it clear they have no intention of allowing the Republicans’ clean CR to reach the Senate floor. Instead, Shaheen shrugged off the union’s plea as old news.
“I had a conversation with the president of AFGE earlier, right after the shutdown, and that was their position then. So that’s not a new position,” Shaheen told CNN.
The shutdown is beginning to bite after nearly a month without funding. CBS News reports that on Sunday, “more than 8,700 U.S. flights were delayed, FlightAware data shows, as air traffic controller shortages rise. Such workers are set to miss their first full paychecks on Tuesday.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned on Fox News that air traffic controller shortages will grow as the checks fail to arrive.
“I’ve been out talking to air traffic controllers, and you can see the stress. These are people that oftentimes live paycheck to paycheck … they are concerned about gas in the car, they are concerned about child care,” Duffy said.
Meanwhile, states like New Hampshire are looking for ways to pay for SNAP benefits — also known as food stamps — that low-income Granite Staters rely on for food. The USDA says there will be no SNAP funding as of Nov. 1 unless the Democrats’ filibuster ends.
“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” the agency said in a statement.
Thus far, Democrats aren’t budging. Instead, they believe shutdown politics is a partisan winner, according to Axios. One D.C.-area House Democrat told the outlet on background that the AFGE statement is meaningless.
“They think Republicans have been shutting down the government anyway and buy our argument [about the] ACA,” the lawmaker said.
The “ACA” is a reference to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Shaheen, Sen. Maggie Hassan, and the rest of New Hampshire’s federal delegation support blocking government funding until Republicans agree to extend emergency ACA benefits to higher-earning families. When Democrats controlled Congress during the Biden administration, they passed legislation extending those benefits until the end of this year.
“We ought to be able to get government open, keep it open, and make sure that people can afford their health insurance,” Shaheen — who has voted 12 times to keep the government shut down — told WMUR.
The AFGE union says the political posturing must end.
“It’s time for our leaders to start focusing on how to solve problems for the American people, rather than on who is going to get the blame for a shutdown that Americans dislike,” Kelley said.
The two Republicans running to replace Shaheen agree.
“There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown told NHJournal. “Shutting down the government to achieve a policy objective does not end well for the responsible party, a painful lesson the Democrats are about to learn as even some of their erstwhile allies jump off the sinking ship.
“If we want to change how things are done in D.C., it starts by ending the political dynasties that have made up our federal delegation on both sides of the aisle for too long,” Brown added.
John E. Sununu is also a former U.S. senator, and he served three terms in the U.S. House as well.
“When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, Chris Pappas voted with her 222 out of 223 times. His refusal to reopen the government is just more of the same — kowtowing to party bosses and hard-left politics,” he told NHJournal.
“I’ve never voted to shut down government and will always put New Hampshire first.”
Sununu’s comment about hard-left politics echoes a new analysis of the Democratic Party’s struggles released Monday. According to Semafor, which received a pre-release copy, the analysis involved hundreds of thousands of voters over six months and was conducted on behalf of the centrist Democratic organization Welcome.
The research shows the Democratic Party “keeps losing ground with less affluent voters and with unions. Those unions’ rank and file, increasingly, see Democrats as cultural elitists who look down on them and want to replace their jobs.”
Dismissing federal union workers’ concerns over their paychecks isn’t likely to change that narrative.
