The clock is ticking on the FAA fight.
If the Sept. 16
deadline goes by and the FAA shuts down once again, remember this as a sign of how serious House Republicans
weren't about averting a shutdown:
In fact, House Republicans still haven't delegated members to a committee conference where their differences with Senate Democrats can be hashed out—increasing the possibility of shutdown déjà vu come Sept. 16.
Both the House and Senate had passed long-term FAA bills months ago; in fact, as of Aug. 9, a letter from Democratic senators to John Boehner said:
More than 120 days ago, a bipartisan group of Senators was appointed to the conference committee between the Senate and House FAA bills. These Senators are eager to negotiate in earnest, but their House counterparts have not been named more than 4 months after the House passed their FAA bill. The lack of conferees from the House is the main obstacle standing in the way of Congress’ ability to produce a bipartisan, long-term, extension of the FAA.
As Dave Jamieson explains, the stakes are high:
Many of the workers who were furloughed last time still haven't been paid for the paychecks they missed, which is money that hasn’t being pumped into local markets. And even though stop-work orders may be issued and then lifted at a moment's notice, massive construction projects unfortunately can't be stopped and restarted with such ease.
"It's not easy, and it's not free," said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America. "Taxpayers end up paying more every time they shut it down. They have to secure these sites."
"If this happens again," Turmail went on, "especially in the northern states with short construction seasons and long winters, you could have delays not of a week or two weeks but of four months."
As cannot be said enough times here, since you know the traditional media will downplay it, Republican footdragging on this issue is all about taking union rights from workers. They want to count people as having voted no in union representation elections who actually had not voted—an anti-democratic standard under which there would be no one in the House of Representatives if that's how federal elections were held.