Congress was scheduled to fly out of town yesterday for a week long recess...
It's all cooperation and bipartisanship when their own sweet fannies might suffer:
Congress Passes Bill To End Air Traffic Control Furloughs
WASHINGTON -- Furloughed air traffic controllers will soon be heading back to work, ending a week of coast-to-coast flight delays that left thousands of travelers frustrated and furious.
Unable to ignore the travelers' anger, Congress overwhelmingly approved legislation Friday to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to withdraw the furloughs. The vote underscored a shift by Democrats who had insisted on erasing all of this year's $85 billion in across-the-board budget cuts, not just the most publicly painful ones, for fear of losing leverage to restore money for Head Start and other programs with less lobbying clout and popular support.
With President Barack Obama's promised signature, the measure will erase one of the most stinging and publicly visible consequences of the budget-wide cuts known as the sequester.
Friday's House approval was 361-41 and followed the previous evening's passage by the Senate, which didn't even bother with a roll call. Lawmakers then streamed toward the exits - and airports - for a weeklong spring recess.
Don't insult whores dales, whores do not deny they are going to fuck you for money.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
The eminent Dr. Sowell provides guidance on this sort of affair in several essays. In short, if a government agency provides a variety of services, some of which are vital and some are utterly worthless, and the budget is cut, it will immediately curtail the vital services in an attempt to provoke public outrage. If it curtailed its worthless (usually administrative) activities, no one would notice or care, and the budget cut would become permanent.
The very idea that FAA did not already have sufficient legal flexibility to avoid these layoffs is ridiculous.
dgs49 wrote:The very idea that FAA did not already have sufficient legal flexibility to avoid these layoffs is ridiculous.
Ridiculous but true. That was the whole point of the "sequester"--to deprive the government of any flexibility whatsoever, in order to force Congress to do its job.
People who are wrong are just as sure they're right as people who are right. The only difference is, they're wrong.
— God@The Tweet of God
What struck me about this, is that despite all their ideological differences, when it comes to their own personal well being, and their ability to get home from Reagan National...
Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders are dancing cheek-to-cheek...
Ted Cruz and Al Franken are arm-in-arm singing Give Peace A Chance....
Filibuster shmilibuster...
Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are tongue kissing (okay, that's a really horrifying and disturbing mental image; I offer it only as an allegory...) when it comes to something like this...
Last edited by Lord Jim on Sun May 12, 2013 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
People had a disconnect on this. There is a dedicated source of funding to pay for air traffic controllers, namely fees charged to each passenger to fund that activity. If as suggested by some, the fees do not cover all of the cost of the air traffic controllers, then the FAA and Congress should be doing their jobs better and make users of this government service pay the full cost in the form of higher fees.
