1/14/19
Donald Trump earned yet another presidential superlative last week when his border-wall shutdown entered its 22nd day, thereby becoming the longest funding lapse in U.S. history. For the first time since the shutdown began, an estimated 800,000 federal employees did not receive their regular paychecks, and Trump's vow to keep the government closed for "months or even years" unless Democrats agree to make taxpayers pay for his wall does not bode well for those employees' odds of receiving their next paychecks in a timely manner, either. Mortgages and student-loan payments and utility bills are not tolled by dysfunction in Washington. The president, however, addressed the plight of these middle-class civil servants by confidently predicting that they will "make adjustments." He did not elaborate. Trump is not the only Republican politician whose comments betray a cheerful disinterest in what life might be like in America for anyone who is not rich. House Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows assured The Washington Post that random, periodic interruptions in compensation are simply one of the less pleasant parts of accepting federal employment. Meadows courageously volunteered to forgo his congressional salary for as long as this thing persists, but it might not matter much to him anyway. As of 2015, his net worth was estimated to be as high as $6.9 million. Before the shutdown began, Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry pooh-poohed the notion that it could have any measurable impact on government workers, who on average make about one-third less than their equally qualified counterparts in the private sector. "Who's living that they're not going to make it to the next paycheck?" he asked.
Lindsey Graham, who spent years cultivating a reputation as a moderate Republican until he figured out that performing extremism would lead to better cable-news bookings and more prestigious committee appointments, acknowledged that a shutdown might be "inconvenient" for federal personnel "caught up in this mess," which is quite the euphemism for a crisis precipitated entirely by the president's obsession with the most recent thing Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh said into a microphone. There is a very good reason that Americans pin blame for the shutdown on Trump by an overwhelming 55-32 margin: For Democrats, the most important task is getting the government open and its employees working again. For Republicans, however, the most important task is delivering to Trump what he wants. One party has focused its messaging on the real-life impact of the shutdown; the other has focused its messaging on funding a construction project to which 56 percent of Americans are opposed. When federal employees are driving for ride-share companies because Republicans have taken their paychecks hostage, blame becomes a pretty easy thing to assign. The GOP might not be prone to such fundamental miscalculations, of course, if it were at all aware of what political conflicts mean for anyone who is not a big-money Republican donor. But it is an out-of-touch party whose sole purpose is to protect the interests of millionaires and billionaires, and it has spent the past two years pushing an agenda designed to allow rich people to stay that way. It isn't that Republicans don't care about middle-class Americans, necessarily—it's that Republicans aren't even aware that middle-class Americans exist.
