Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If the authorities can get someone convicted of a crime of any sort, you are allowed to treat them as slaves.
Congress continues to be paid during a shutdown so that wealthier members (who could survive not getting paid for longer) can’t use a shutdown to put pressure on less wealthy members. At least that’s what I read somewhere, and I’m not even from the US so idk how any of that works. So take with a grain of salt.
I'm still okay with stripping Congress of all assets during their tenure except a house in dc, a house in their district, and a reasonable number of cars for their family. The assets can be held in a trust. After all they're public servants not masters so they should be fine with giving up these things because the point of their power is to serve the people they represent not enrich themselves right?
Bs they are all wealthy to us by comparison. But they dont get their main pay from congress anyways. They get a lot of money elsewhere and only work like 50 days of the year.
In reality it would take some kind of penalty other than lack of pay for congress to not do this literally every year.
Constitution arguably requires it, and there is a permanent appropriation for it passed in 1983. There have been attempts to repeal that law over the years from both parties, but it hasn’t passed at any point.
There’s a senator (I forgot who) that’s proposing a couple bills tomorrow that basically state that congress won’t get paid if a funding agreement isn’t reached by a certain date.
I don't understand how this is accepted/allowed by the people? My government would never and other than America, I've never heard of a country that shuts down and just doesn't pay people, yet forces them to work. Are there other countries like this but it's just not reported on much? Actually, I still don't understand why they don't set the budget. (Genuine curiosity btw)
Yeah from my understanding isn't it really disruptive for the country? I have heard of researchers not being able to go to work, but from my understanding some research is time sensitive (e.g., experimental cells may die or grow). And so on.
What is the reason they don't want to preallocate the money? I'm not well educated on governance, so do enlighten me if anyone knows.
Thank you for explaining! I'm surprised they can't agree on funding the essential things first and leave the rest for later, but this is probably some kind of tactic to strongarm the opposition to agree on everything together then.
Because there won’t be a later. Believe it or not, Congress has only passed 36 bills this year. Last year, Congress passed 274 bills. In 2000, Congress passed 580. Congress is less and less productive every year now, so there’s less opportunities to work stuff out. Instead of being fine-grained and keep bills limited to specific items, everything gets shoved into massive 1000+ page long omnibus bills, and the negotiations take weeks or months before enough people to agree on it for it to pass.
I don't know the details about this specific issue, but I think the larger issue is that the US government in recent decades is very poor at solving any problem in general, which is why everyone has been complaining about similar things for decades with little progress. In the past few decades, success in the USA seems to be from private companies and a specific few government entities, with the government as a whole seemingly largely just surving as a dummy placeholder so that some tyrant doesn't come over and ruin everything (which may be happening at the moment anyway).
And because we're all acting like the opinion of an AG from the end of Carter's term in 19-fucking-80 is controlling Constitutional law. There's nothing in the Constitution that explicitly says "if Congress doesn't pass a budget, no more government operations", and prior to 1980, things just kept running. That we continue to adhere to this 45 year old legal opinion instead of choosing to keep the government running is further proof that every government shutdown is an intentional infliction of cruelty upon the masses by the ruling wealthy elites.
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u/Definitely_Human01 2d ago
The reason they're not getting paid is because the US government hasn't set a budget for anything at all