Let us be honest, the government is going to shut down. The TEA Party is insisting on a shutdown. If the non-TEA Party wing of the Republican Party attempts to cut a deal they risk their party disintegrating. There will be a shutdown, and it will be a long one. Once things come to a standstill Republicans are likely to try to escalate the cost of restarting government, not negotiate towards a middle ground. If this happens we as progressives need to organize as quickly as possible to get what aid we can to the families of our men and women in the military.
Military pay, especially for enlisted members, is nothing to write home about. Many of our young soldiers, and their families, live paycheck to paycheck. There next paycheck will be halved and, barring something unexpected, they will not receive another one for a good long time. During a long shutdown non-essential civilian employers can attempt to find temporary work. Essential employees have the option of moving to jobs in the private sector. Pay or no pay our military members are required to come into work. With this comes the over heads in transportation, dry cleaning and childcare but without the paycheck that is normally included for such things. Worse the transient nature of military life means many spouses of our service members do not stay in one place long enough to accumulate seniority in private sector jobs. This leads to a double whammy of one spouse bringing in no pay and the other lower paid than they might otherwise have been.
No money means no money. Without a paycheck a soldier in Afghanistan is going to have difficulty putting food on the table for their family back home. While I’m sure that we will see an explosion in short term loans, at hideous terms, relying on loan sharks can only get a family so far. It would be nice to think that, during a long shutdown, congress will make some provision to pay our troops. Such agreement is unlikely. The TEA Party has adopted a paranoid mindset. In their world the military is only one spark away from overthrowing the Black Kenyan Muslim in the White House. When this doesn’t happen, I expect that they will seek to increase the pressure on the military to make it happen. To be clear, I think that there is zero chance of a military coup. That won’t stop military families from becoming victims of the paranoid delusions of some members of congress.
We in the progressive community need to address this as a coming crisis. We are not at fault for the shutdown. We have capitulated to everything the Republican negotiators originally asked for in a budget, only to have them come back with new demands. Needless to say that that point negotiations can go no farther. While we are not at fault as combatants in this fight we have a responsibility to minimize the fallout on innocent parties. If a shutdown happens we need to take the coming week to organize a system to get aid to food banks and other charitable institutions around military bases. Our service members have volunteered to fight and if need be die for this country, not to become pawns in political games.