NOV 01, 2025
“There’s hope in the words and emotion in the eyes
It’s so easy to be misled by the savvy gentle guise
And like fools we trust the delivery
But it’s all just drunk sincerity”
-Bad Religion, ‘Drunk Sincerity’
The decrepit fiends of The Swamp are out in full force putting on a big show of solidarity with all of their subjects constituents left out in the rain when the gears of state grind to a halt. What they rarely, if ever, mention is that their paychecks arrive regardless of whether the government gets shut down or not, or for how long.
Via Constitution Center: “Over in the Legislative Branch, the support staff for Congress would be affected. “During a funding gap, pay for congressional employees would not be disbursed if there is no appropriation to fund legislative branch activities,” the CRS says. Staffers deemed critical would need to work because they are needed to “support Congress with its constitutional responsibilities or those necessary to protect life and property.”
Members of Congress will still get paychecks, under two parts of the Constitution. Article I, Section 6, says that congress members “shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States.” The 27th Amendment also forbids any change in the compensation rate for Congress during a current term.”
Here is Democratic Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives Katherine Clark, describing the denial of millions of Americans the benefits they have been conditioned to rely on, as points of political “leverage”: “Of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously, but it is one of the few leverage times we have.”
One can argue about the merits of the Democrat demands; extending Affordable Care Act tax credits, although by no means a permanent solution to the ongoing controlled demolition of the middle class by neoliberal policymakers or the farce that is the so-called healthcare system, would help working-class taxpayers barely scraping by significantly in the short term.
The essential issue is that the Congress members playing the cards don’t actually have any chips in the game; it’s all House money, as it were. The suffering of their constituents, as laid bare in the above quote, is just another point of “leverage” in the political games they play (with other people’s money).
From a broader perspective, in the same way that the CIA budget doubled in the two decades after the greatest intelligence failure of all time, 9/11, the career success of your standard Congressman is wholly untethered from whatever results he does or doesn’t produce for his constituents. As long as the august Senator plays the game right, as long as he serves his actual constituency (the donor class) he wins — no matter how much his theoretical constituents suffer.
This entire spectacle is the product of a political system in which the governing authorities and the governed occupy two entirely separate castes of society, with little to no intercaste mobility. The members of the subordinate underclass who do break the mold, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, either sell their souls on arrival (like AOC) or else are quickly shunned just as soon as their colleagues catch the slightest whiff of populist sentimentality.
This is class war — but an asymmetric one, waged by the permanent governing class against the (increasingly permanent) underclass. It’s socialism for them, as they feed off of government largesse and abuse the mechanisms of state to enrich themselves, and bootstrap capitalism for you.