Louisiana Voice

Okay, campers, here’s all you need to know about who suffers and who doesn’t after one full month of the governmental shutdown.

About 730,000 federal employees are working without pay.

About 670,000 workers have been furloughed.

• Two million active-duty and reserve members of the military were paid on Oct. 15 because about $8 billion in Pentagon R&D funds was used but there isn’t enough to meet today’s payroll.
• Federal contractors, including personnel who provide security and clean offices are laid off with no guarantee of back pay. (The exception here might be the contractor who’s constructing Trump’s $300 million grand ballroom.)
• Senate staffers won’t be paid for the remainder of the shutdown after missing their Oct. 20 paychecks.
• Essential staff in the judicial branch are working without pay while other court employees are furloughed.

Moreover, to pile insult onto injury, Chief Yellow Feathers said he is thinking about a new interpretation of the law which will allow him to not provide back pay for furloughed employees once the shutdown is over.

BUT…El Presidente, Hillbilly Boy Vance, members of the Supreme Court and members of the House and Senate have not missed a penny since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Here are their numbers:

House and Senate members – $174,000 per year, or $476.71 per day. That comes to $14,778 each for the first 31 days of the shutdown – for doing nothing. Bear in mind, if you will, at the $7.25 federal minimum wage, a worker would have to work 40 hours a week year-round to pull down $15,080. Multiply that $14,778 by 530 members (after excluding the Speaker and the four majority and minority leaders – they get paid a tad more) and you find that as a group they have been paid $7,832.383 since Oct. 1.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who steadfastly refuses to call the House into session so as to keep from releasing the Epstein files in order to protect a pedophile: $233,500, or $529.86 per day. He raked in $18,982.23 for sitting on his ass during October.

The majority and minority leaders in both chambers (4 altogether) receive $193,400 per year each. That’s $529.86 per day each, or $16,425.66 per day each. Multiplied by four and we see that altogether they raked in $65,702.64 for staying home.

That comes to a grand total of $7,867,753 and change for just the members of Congress during the first month of the shutdown. (And after 3,226 days in office, Sen. John N. Kennedy still has not held a town hall meeting.)

It’s not altogether fair to go beyond those 535 individuals because the administrative and judicial branches have continued to work (work being a relative term), but just for fun, let’s toss in Trump’s $33,972.60 for the same 31 days, J.D. Vance’s $19,967.39, Chief Justice John Roberts’s $26,965 and the $206,281.64 for the remaining eight associate justices and that grand total is bumped up to $8,154,938.

Also continuing to receive pay are members of the FBI (including Director Kash Patel), all political appointees who are confirmed by the Senate, federal judges, 70,000 personnel in the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Secret Service.

Funny, but from this perspective, it appears that priority is being given to those with authority to keep the rest of us in line and to enforce whatever Trump says the law is while rank and file workers who actually get things done are being given the ol’ shaft.

Not sure, but I think that’s called a police state.