The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a traditional booster of the GOP, is not amused by the chaos among House Republicans and the government shutdown they are intent on inflicting. “I’ve started calling this the ‘Seinfeld Shutdown,’” Executive Vice President Neil Bradley told Bloomberg News. “It’s really not very clear what, if anything, that they’re fighting over other than fighting.”
It seems like House Republicans think the same thing. Here’s what a senior member of the GOP told Fox News’ Chad Pergram:
It’s not even all Republicans fighting; it’s just a “pissing match” between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and chaos agent Rep. Matt Gaetz. That’s the “whole reason” the government faces a shutdown.
That pissing match is going to cost the nation a whole lot—which is why the Chamber isn’t happy about this. Plenty of economists fear a prolonged shutdown could send the nation into recession. And it sure won’t be good for the people who sent both Gaetz and McCarthy to Congress.
The Congressional Research Service used census data to estimate how many federal employees—those people who are going to be sent home without pay when the government shuts down—are in each congressional district.
McCarthy’s district has about 14,000 federal workers, representing nearly 4% of the district’s workforce. This is just civilian employees, by the way, and not military. McCarthy brags about the military installations he represents on his congressional website: Edwards Air Force Base and the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake. He also touts the Mojave Air and Space Port and the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center.
The people working on those installations won’t be getting paid, either. Neither will the service members stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, Hurlburt Field, and Pensacola Naval Air Station in Gaetz’s district in Florida. Gaetz represents even more federal employees than McCarthy, about 25,000 in the 1st Congressional District. That’s nearly 7% of all workers, and one of largest contingents of federal workers who would be hit by the shutdown.
The impact of the pissing match between Gaetz and McCarthy on tens of thousands of their constituents, not to mention the whole of the federal workforce, won’t be a laughing matter.
National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald described what happened to federal workers during the last shutdown: “We had thousands of members across the country who missed a mortgage payment, took out short term loans and ran up their credit card debt because they had no paychecks for a month. They stood in line at food banks, pulled their children from childcare, begged creditors for grace and were unable to put gas in their cars to report to work for an IOU. This is not how the United States of America should treat its own employees,” Greenwald said.
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