Oct. 27 (UPI) — The Senate is scheduled to meet at 3 p.m. EDT Monday, but there’s no plan to vote on a funding bill on the 27th day of the federal government shutdown.
Meanwhile, the largest labor union in the United States has called on lawmakers to reopen the government.
“Both political parties have made their point, and still there is no clear end in sight,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. The union represents 800,000 federal government workers.
The statement offered a path for Congress: “Reopen the government immediately under a clean continuing resolution that allows continued debate on larger issues; ensure back pay for every single employee who has served or been forced to stay home through no fault of their own; work together on a bipartisan basis to address important policy matters like addressing rising costs and fixing the broken appropriations process.”
“None of these steps favor one political side over another,” it continued. “They favor the American people — who expect stability from their government and responsibility from their leaders.”
The law says that federal employees who work without pay during government shutdowns are entitled to back pay once the government reopens, according to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019. But President Donald Trump has implied that he doesn’t intend to pay all of them.
“For the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” Trump said Oct. 7. “I would say it depends on who we’re talking about.”
The president is out of the country for a trip through Asia, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said the president expects Congress to take care of the issue.
“President Trump has entrusted us to fix this because this is an Article I branch problem. The president tried his best, he brought them in before all this madness started, and Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries effectively told him to jump in the Potomac,” Johnson said.
“So it’s up to the Democrats, everybody knows that. The president said he’ll meet with them on any issue under the sun. We’re delighted to talk about it, but they have to get the government reopened first.”
Last week, Schumer, D-N.Y. and Jeffries, D-N.Y., requested a meeting with the president, who declined. He insisted that they end the shutdown first.
The Senate will vote Monday evening to confirm two judicial nominees.