Furloughed federal workers aren’t guaranteed compensation for their forced time off during the government shutdown, according to a draft White House memo described to Axios by three sources.
If the White House acts on that legal analysis, it would dramatically escalate President Trump‘s pressure on Senate Democrats to end the week-old shutdown by denying back pay to as many as 750,000 federal workers after the shutdown.
Trump wants the Democrats to back a continuing resolution to fund the government with no strings about healthcare subsidies attached.
“This would not have happened if Democrats voted for the clean CR,” a senior administration official said.
How can they do this? Well:
At issue is the ”Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019″ that Trump signed during the last government shutdown, which lasted a record 35 days.
Called GEFTA, the law has been widely interpreted as ensuring that furloughed workers automatically would be compensated after future shutdowns.
But the new White House memo from the Office of Management and Budget argues that GEFTA has been misconstrued or, in the words of one source, is “deficient” because it was amended nine days later, on Jan. 25, 2019.
“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,” a senior White House official said.
The new OMB analysis is a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued by the Council of Economic Advisers this month and the Office of Personnel Management last month. Both said furloughed workers should get automatic back pay after the shutdown.
“OMB is in charge,” a senior White House official said.
Yeah, we know.
The White House’s stance revolves around the law’s amended version, which added a phrase saying furloughed workers shall be compensated “subject to the enactment of appropriations Acts ending the lapse.” That’s a technical phrase for shutdown.
To the White House, that means money for those workers needs to be specifically appropriated by Congress. The joint resolution containing that amendment to the law specified that the U.S. government would pay “obligations incurred” during that 2019 shutdown.
“If it [GEFTA] was self-executing” in future shutdowns, “why did Congress do that? It’s precedent,” the White House official said, calling any other interpretation “ridiculous.”
[…]
The White House analysis of the law reflects the administration’s multipronged effort to make the shutdown unbearable for Democrats.
The furlough of hundreds of thousands of workers each day follows the administration’s widespread, DOGE-led cuts to the federal workforce earlier this year…
That’s what Trump was talking about this morning when he said:
Q: Is it the White House's position that furloughed workers should get backpay?
Bondi: "Karoline Leavitt is one of the most trustworthy human being I know. And Sen. Schiff, if you worked for me, you would've been fired." pic.twitter.com/Kl3EI480y1
Schmitt: "Let's just call it out. We need a cleansing here. Let's just be truthful about what's happening. This left-wing political violence is not a both sides thing. It's not." pic.twitter.com/S4vGfLQogP
Trump: "The Democrats have no leader. They remind me of Somalia. I met the president of Somalia. I told him, 'you have somebody from Somalia who's telling us how to run our country. Would you like to take her back?' He said, 'No I don't want her!'" pic.twitter.com/1cVOLxqOzR
I could go on but why bother? Our national leadership is sophomoric, stupid, crude and mean. They don’t even bother to pretend to be dignified adults anymore. Our world is run by shitposters.
A Rutgers University professor is temporarily relocating to Europe as he grapples with threats that intensified after a student group affiliated with the organization founded by murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk accused him of being “a prominent leader of the antifa movement on campus”.
Rutgers’ Turning Point USA chapter also says the presence of Mark Bray – whose work has closely examined antifascist movements – threatens them and is calling for his firing from the New Jersey university, prompting the academic to say those demands are little more than “manufactured outrage”.
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of any kind of antifascist or anti-racist organization – I just haven’t. I’m a professor,” Bray said on Monday about the circumstances. Noting that antifa is a decentralized movement, he added: “I’m a professor of the history of the left.”
A Change.org petition calling for the termination of Bray’s employment at Rutgers came Thursday, several weeks after Kirk – the founder of Turning Point USA – was shot to death by a sniper on 10 September.
Turning Point USA has chapters at various college campuses. And the treasurer for the chapter at Rutgers, student Megyn Doyle, told Fox News Digital that the petition was made necessary by the fact that Bray “puts conservative students at risk for antifa to come in”.
“You have a teacher that so often promotes political violence, especially in his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which talks about militant fascism, which is on term with political violence,” Doyle said.
Bray countered that he is an antifascist “insofar as I don’t like fascism”. But he denied that he is a threat to conservative students
Contrary to popular belief, Julius Caesar was not the first living leader to put his portrait on a coin. A couple of others beat him to it, including Persia’s Darius the Great. But the Roman emperor was the first to break with tradition and distribute them to ensure his subjects understood that he possessed absolute power and, not incidentally, controlled the empire’s money supply. It was a savvy move, copied by monarchs and dictators across the world ever since.
America has long followed suit, featuring the faces of our leaders on our currency, but with an important caveat: They had to be long out of power and in their graves. No monarchy or dictatorship for us; we were hostile to the idea of minting the portrait of a living leader for the very reason Caesar thought it was such a clever idea. Our Constitution meant to ensure that no one person in American life would ever have sole unlimited power.
In 1877, Congress even passed a law prohibiting it, which says that “only the portrait of deceased individuals may occur on the United States currency and securities.” Even coins that will be minted for the 250th anniversary of the nation have a special section in the code which states, “No coin issued under this subsection may bear the image of a living former or current President, or of any deceased former President during the 2-year period following the date of the death of that President.”
But that was before we had our own Orange Caesar, who believes he can rule by fiat, supported by Republicans in Congress, and then allow the Supreme Court to sort it out, usually in his favor.
On Oct. 3 it was reported that the Treasury has designed and prepared to mint a new $1 coin with President Donald Trump’s face in honor of the country’s 250th celebration in 2026. The founders would be so proud to know that we made it that far before we finally succumbed to tyranny.
The front of the coin will feature Trump in profile, with his trademark 1967 Las Vegas lounge act hairstyle delineated in fine detail. The back will depict the famous fist pump pose from his 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, along with the words “fight, fight, fight.”
When images of the new coin were shared on X, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach replied, “No fake news here. These first drafts honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real. Looking forward to sharing more soon, once the obstructionist shutdown of the United States government is over.” In true Trumpist fashion, there is every reason to believe the administration will go ahead and mint the coins. By the time it’s litigated, the money will already be in circulation — and that will be that.
This is hardly the most important example from the lengthy list of Trump’s abuses of power. But symbols matter, and this one cuts to the very heart of who he is — and what he fancies himself to be. An emperor or king who rules not by the consent of the governed, but by divine right.
This is hardly the most important example from the lengthy list of Trump’s abuses of power. But symbols matter, and this one cuts to the very heart of who he is — and what he fancies himself to be. An emperor or king who rules not by the consent of the governed, but by divine right.
His princely ambitions are hardly new revelations; the signs are everywhere. Trump has decorated the White House to conjure his low-rent version of a European palace, complete with portraits of himself and gilded fixtures — that some intrepid internet sleuths suspect were sourced not from some continental antiques dealer but from the aisles of Home Depot. (As it turns out, there’s one just over three miles away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) Work has commenced on a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the first known new construction to expand the White House’s footprint since President Theodore Roosevelt had the West Wing added in 1902 and his successor, President William Howard Taft, doubled it in size. Trump has called himself “THE KING” on social media, and in February he even posted on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
This much is clear: The president has no respect for the American anti-monarchical tradition and style, and he seems to lack any real understanding that it’s our fundamental reason for being.
The real problem, of course, is that Trump is abusing his power in a manner that is tearing this country apart. His despotic dismissals of the rule of law, in ways both large and small, are creating what many in the GOP have long fantasized: An imperial presidency. This Trumpist fulfillment is largely enabled by a supine Republican Congress and a Supreme Court that is seemingly eager to codify it. He is using every back door, loophole and extreme interpretation of the law to expand executive power and smother the system of checks and balances. And it’s working.
Federal troops are wreaking havoc in the streets, people are being abducted and sent to prison camps — or disappeared entirely — and the military is executing orders to murder foreign civilians on the high seas. The administration is slashing vital services, firing thousands of federal workers and using the power of the state to intimidate and blackmail private institutions from universities to law firms to corporations, and otherwise running roughshod over every aspect of American society. The world economy is dizzy from Trump’s incoherent tariff scheme, while at home he has seized the power of the purse from the Congress to spend the country’s money any way he chooses. He may even succeed in controlling the money supply and the economy if the Supreme Court signs off on it (and if he decides to abide by their decision). So far, little has stopped his quest for possessing the unfettered power of an anointed king.
The recent state visit to the U.K. where Trump and his entourage once again behaved like crass tourists, actually exposed the plight of the real modern monarch. At the behest of the government seeking to appease the president’s need for flattery, the British royal family was forced to pretend they were happy to host yet another over-the-top extravaganza for a man who bragged he could have succeeded in seducing Prince William’s mother Diana before her death in 1997. On this visit — having taken the measure of the man in the past and realizing his need for the imperial treatment — they deployed the famed Irish and Scottish state coaches to treat Trump to a carriage procession through the grounds of Windsor Castle.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla didn’t do this because they wanted to. (Trump’s anti-climate change agenda is anathema to the famously green king, who reportedly raised the issue with the president both in private and during his remarks at the state banquet. Nevertheless, Charles apparently played “a critical role” in Trump’s shift in favor of Ukraine in its war with Russia, which he announced a few days after returning from the U.K.) The royals were used by the British government as props to curry favor with the man who has an unquenchable thirst for boot-licking from famous, wealthy people. That’s one of their jobs in 2025.
British currency still has the king’s face on it. But over there, long after successive monarchs surrendered their absolute power, it has come to represent tradition, national unity and stability. Over here, it means a return to the tyranny we once fought against. In a way, after 250 years, perhaps they won the war after all.
If you can watch AG Pam Bondi’s testimony, you have a stronger stomach than I.
She won’t answer questions, but responds with personal attacks.
Durbin: "What has taken place since January 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil. This is your legacy, AG Bondi." pic.twitter.com/u2ZqzZppFM
DURBIN: You won't even say whether you talked to the WH about this?BONDI: I'm not going to discuss any internal conversations with you D: They're going to transfer TX Guard troops to the state of Illinois. What's the rationale?B: I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump
BONDI: The National Guard is on the way right now as we speak. You're sitting here grilling me and they're on their way to Chicago to keep your state safe.DURBIN: It's my job to grill you
WHITEHOUSE: How many suspicious activity reports did you investigate out of the hundreds related to accounts of Jeffrey Epstein?BONDI: I'm not sure if you're concerned, because you took money I believe from Reid Hoffman, if that's correctWHITEHOUSE: You seem to have looked at 0 of them
Professional law enforcement does not behave this way. Not in a democratic republic. But then….
Videos confirm why Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker advised his citizens to know their rights, have their cell phones ready, and document everything done by “[DHS secretary Kristi] Noem’s thugs.” Calling them law enforcement is unjustified. Actual law enforcement professionals must be horrified. Citizens of Chicago filed suit (Axios):
A coalition of Chicago journalists, organizations and protesterssued President Trump and top administration officials over federal agents’ “pattern of extreme brutality” at a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
“Never in modern times has the federal government undermined bedrock constitutional protections on this scale,” their filing argues. “The individual acts of brutality by federal officers are too numerous to catalogue.”
The videos tell the tale. Watch this one carefully as this “law enforcement professional” chokeslams a protester.
In Chicago this weekend.Trump's thugs beat the hell out of this young guy who was just standing there.He is now in the hospital. The thug who beat him was doxxed by the female activist who Border Patrol shot on Saturday.He went from the scene of the shooting to this.@democrats.senate.gov
Is that taught in ICE training? How much training do these armed thugs receive? I ask jokingly if ICE trains its agents over Zoom or over the weekend. Did ICE recruit the man above over Craigslist, from the WWE, or from a prison gang?
Watch this pair of clownish “professionals” sloppily attempt (and fail) to abduct a Latino man near 63rd and Kostner in Chicago. Again, how are these men being trained, and for how long, before sent to the streets of our cities?
ICE tells Next 9NEWS that its agents are following their policies. Exactly what are those policies? What local police routinely behave this way where you live?
“ICE acted like an invading army in our neighb’ds,” said state Rep. Lilian Jiménez, a Democrat. “These shameful & lawless actions are not only a violation of constit’l rights but of our most basic liberty: the right to live free from persecution and fear.”
ProPublica published a series of such videos at the end of July. The violence against what Trump dubbed “the enemy from within” has escalated since Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“The assault has become increasingly brutal as Trump and his allies intensify their demonization of all things left of center, by which they often seem to mean anything to the left of the hard right,” writes Thomas Edsall.
Edsall asked political scientist Barbara Walter of the University of California-San Diego, author of How Civil Wars Start,” what the end game is for Trump 2.0:
“Do you think Trump, Miller and other allies are hoping to provoke violence in order to justify further punitive or repressive policies?”
Her emailed reply: “The short answer is yes.”
The longer answer?
The biggest challenge that aspiring autocrats face is that their citizens still have rights, freedoms and real political power. In a functioning democracy, citizens can still vote their leaders out of office and there’s nothing a democratically elected leader can legally do about it. That’s why autocrats-in-waiting often look for ways to get rid of these constraints. They can rig elections, suppress opposition or, as history shows, manufacture a crisis that justifies emergency powers.
Provoking violence is a common way to do this.
Is it working? Walter:
The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.
BREAKING: Stephen Miller—both Trump Administration capo and de facto head of DHS, ICE, and DOJ, has just declared that peaceful protesters are "street terrorists." Under an executive order signed by Trump just days ago, that means he is saying that all protesters in America can be arrested on sight.
Brace yourselves. Have your cell phones ready and document everything. If ever there is an investigation and prosecution over these events, videos will be needed. The scene of the crime is far more dispersed than it was on January 6, 2021.
President Donald Trump suggested Monday he could invoke the Insurrection Act if courts continue to block deployments of troops to cities nationwide, raising the prospect of using the centuries-old law to bypass unfavorable rulings.
“So far it hasn’t been necessary, but we have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I do that.”
“I mean, I want to make sure that people aren’t killed. We have to make sure that our cities are safe,” he concluded.
First, people are being killed. By ICE. There have been several. But that’s fine. The ICE agents are sensitive men who need to hide their identities and they get frightened so they have to shoot people. So far, none of them have been seriously hurt. Protesters and immigrants? They’re being rousted and beaten all over the place.
But how about that new rationale that he can invoke it if the courts are holding them up?
Q: "Do Democrats not have reason to be concerned that there are long term plans by this administration to keep the U.S. military or National Guard in American cities?"
Leavitt: "You guys are framing this like the president wants to take over American cities with the military." pic.twitter.com/kR0KH34A9Q
Clara Jeffries at Mother Jones has written an important and useful piece about what Blue states can do to fight the federal government’s fascistic takeover. She begins by pointing out all the ways in which blue states, especially California, are economic powerhouses with substantial power and discusses some of the plans that have been proposed on over the years. I often hear people saying that we should refuse to send our taxes to the federal government but there isn’t a real mechanism to do that.
Short of actual secession, what could California do? It could learn from the Jimmy Kimmel showdown and lead a financial “countervalue” rebellion, using “the full weight of blue states’ market power, cultural influence and legal authority to raise the stakes of Republican red-state aggression,” Democratic strategists Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight wrote in the Washington Post, by imposing “regulatory and economic costs that bite hard enough to make the constituents of even the most insulated legislator feel the pain.” We could start by disinvesting our pension funds from red-state companies like AT&T, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and Tesla. “The 15 blue trifectas (states where Democrats control the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature), with their larger state budgets and more generous pensions, have state investments that total almost 75 percent more than the 23 red trifectas,” they note.
If that seems a reach, consider that Texas effectively got BlackRock to drop its “woke” investment and governance policies by blackballing it. Blue states could lure away techies, doctors, nurses, and electricians with relocation bonuses. We could institute tax and other incentives to pull new factories and data centers away from red states. We could selectively terminate professional licensing reciprocity. We could ease commerce between friendly states and make it difficult for unfriendly ones.
Economic retribution is just part of a broader constellation of tools that law professors Jessica Bulman-Pozen (Columbia) and Heather K. Gerken (Yale) call “uncooperative federalism” and others call “soft secession.” It’s not, writes Substacker Chris Armitage, “the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.” Some of this is already underway. Led by California’s Rob Bonta, the attorneys general of blue states have been having almost daily Zoom calls to plot strategy and file briefs and suits. Democratic governors have devoted tens of millions to hire lawyers for those fights and banded together to oppose Trump’s threats to send troops to their states. In early September, California, Oregon, and Washington created the West Coast Health Alliance to formulate their own vaccine standards and distribute shots, no matter what lunacy Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unleashes. Hawaii signed on a day later. Other blue states are honing similar coalitions.
Unified action could further preserve what the federal government is destroying, law professors Aziz Z. Huq (University of Chicago) and Jon D. Michaels (UCLA) wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Blue states could create “large regional research consortia; re-create public-health and meteorology forecasting centers servicing member states; and finance pandemic planning.” (A proposal to do much of this is underway in Sacramento.) With the Justice Department doing little more than acting as Trump’s goon squad, states could also “mobilize interstate criminal task forces to track and prosecute corruption by politicians, lobbyists and government contractors (who invariably, when violating federal laws, run afoul of myriad state laws, too).” Ditto consumer and environmental investigations—the cost of which could be offset by fines, even as they lay the groundwork for federal prosecutions if America is ever restored to sanity.
But we need to be clear-eyed: Such a restoration may not come in time. So far, this year has been marked by a collective action problem. Media conglomerates, law firms, universities, banks, CEOs—too many powerful institutions and individuals have failed to meet the moment. This is why people all over the country, desperate for pushback against Trump’s autocracy, have embraced Newsom’s redistricting plan, whatever their broader opinions of him. With Trump provocatively sending troops into blue cities, and using recision and the shutdown to claw back congressionally appropriated funds from blue states, it’s time to turn the tables on him. Soft secession, powered by the presidential ambitions of multiple blue-state governors, could, should it come to that, be the proving ground of a new confederacy. Hopefully the threat of CalExit or a new Union will be enough. But that extreme measures might be necessary to ensure that American democracy shall not perish from the Earth is becoming more self-evident with every passing day.
Read the whole thing. There’s a lot of context there that’s important to understand how this might work.
I’m for this. I’d be for a general strike too — even just a day-long spending boycott. If all of us just refuse to buy anything for a day, maybe a day a week or even a month, it could have an effect. But we have to be creative now. This is hurtling out of control very quickly. They are starting to crack heads now and it’s not going to get worse.
It’s worth remembering that Republicans are defending an incredibly narrow House majority in what’s shaping up to be a very bad political environment for the GOP. Trump’s approval right now is about what it was in 2018, when Republicans lost 40 seats. The economy is slowing, and prices remain high. Even under far better circumstances, the president’s party tends to lose House seats in the midterms
Failing to extend the tax credits could turn 2026 from a good Democratic year into a wave election. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a memo Tony Fabrizio — Donald Trump’s own pollster — wrote earlier this summer:
“While the 2024 outcome for these districts was even, the generic Republican is down 3 points among all registered voters. Among those most motivated to vote — an early indicator of midterm turnout — the Republican is down 7 points. If the Republican candidate lets the premium tax credit expire, the Republican trails the Democrat by 15 points. There is broad bipartisan support for the tax credits and their extension.”
If the tax credits aren’t extended, voters will blame Trump and the Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll.
Donald Trump desperately wants to hold on to the House. It’s why he’s bullied a bunch of Republican states into redrawing congressional districts to find more GOP seats. But even the most aggressive gerrymander wouldn’t stand a chance under the scenario painted by Trump’s own pollster.
I don’t know what’s going to happen but it seems that the Democrats realize they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Having said that, we are talking about the U.S. Senate where there are always at least a handful of preening posers looking for a way to pretend to be above all this nasty politickin’ and decide to sell-out their own voters. You can see John Fetterman doing it right now. Luckily, they’ll need more than him and so far there have only been a couple who felt the need to show their plucky independence. But at this point the Democrats are winning.
And by the way, Trump is losing on this other important issue as well:
Trump moving the national guard into cities is a political loser. ~60% of Americans oppose it.
Why? Voters don't buy Trump's argument over crime.
Instead, they say Trump's taken his eye off the ball with too much focus on putting troops in cities & not enough on lower prices. pic.twitter.com/0BWTG6ThUa
God, I hope that one holds up. What Trump is doing with DHS and now the National Guard in Chicago and Portland is fascist to the core. I’m relieved that Americans aren’t happy about it.
