A Whole Month Gone...

The shutdown still sucks.

We're now over a month into the federal government shutdown that started on October 1st, which means the whole month of October was taken up by the shutdown. I still got to work (though many of my coworkers did not), though it was often tricky to work on projects that would take up a whole workday, so I often did half-days. Either way, I miss my regular line of work, and I didn't think the shutdown would last THIS long. Has Congress gone insane?

The votes on the CR have been almost the exact same time after time, the only differences being some absent senators at times. In a previous post, I wondered if Democrats would vote for the CR just in time before the Trump administration would lay off federal workers. Well, the layoffs have already happened - weeks ago! Now, no one seems to have a good guess as to what will finally make the Senate agree on a clean CR. Would it be the first missed paycheck? Nope. Would it be right after the "No Kings" rallies? Nope. But certainly, senators would care enough to pass a CR before November 1st, when SNAP benefits would run out! Still, nope!

The day before the shutdown started, a visitor I talked to predicted the shutdown would be even longer than the last one (which was the longest). I hope he's wrong, but he could be right. Either way, this is certainly an uncertain time for the federal workforce and many others. Who knows when the shutdown will finally end, but since it's anyone's guess, I at least hope that it will end sometime this week so that we can have a bit of normalcy again, and I really hope that this isn't followed by another shutdown on November 21st, when the "new" CR would expire.