Raskin says Trump's threat to withhold back pay from federal workers after shutdown is illegal
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who represents many federal workers, responded on Tuesday to a leaked White House memo arguing that furloughed federal employees may not be entitled to back pay after a government shutdown ends.
“All federal employees are legally entitled to back pay when the government reopens after a shutdown. I know this because in 2019, I helped pass the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act which made this a requirement. Donald Trump knows this, too—he signed it into law,” Raskin said in a statement.
“Now, as the White House reverses course, the president is threatening to deliberately violate the law; or he is suffering from a debilitating case of legislative amnesia. Either way, he should refresh his memory on the law he signed. And if he chooses to barrel forward anyway, he should get ready for a fight in court,” the Maryland congressman continued.
“The president has no right to just pay the federal workers in his own political camp. That’s a violation of the law and of the First Amendment,” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, said.
Key events
Kristi Noem visits Portland Ice office with Maga influencers in tow
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, is currently touring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Portland, Oregon accompanied by conservative influencers who arrived in her motorcade.
Portland police cleared the street outside the Ice office in the city’s south waterfront neighborhood ahead of Noem’s arrival, keeping a handful of protesters, one dressed as a chicken and another as a baby shark, at distance.
A country-style song, with the refrain, “Trump is in the Epstein files, yes he is”, blared from a protest encampment down the street and one protesters shouted to a government videographer on the roof of the facility, “Did we rename the department of homeland security the ministry of propaganda?”
Reporters from local news outlets were also held behind the police line outside, as the partisan influencers in Noem’s entourage, Benny Johnson, Nick Sortor and David Media, shared social media updates of the secretary leading federal officers in prayer inside, giving a pep talk, and telling a member of the Oregon national guard to “Get ready.”
Noem has previously echoed Donald Trump’’s claims that a small band of protesters, who have rallied in their dozens outside the Ice facility since June, including one who wears an inflatable frog costume, are “terrorists” who have placed the office “under siege”, making the deployment of federal troops essential.
On Saturday, a federal judge in Portland blocked Trump’s effort to federalize Oregon’s national guard, determining that the president’s claims that the peaceful city was “burning to the ground” were “untethered to the facts.”
A day later the same judge, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, expanded her order to block national guards troops from any jurisdiction from being deployed in Portland, after Trump tried to deploy members of the California national guard, previously federalized in response to protests in Los Angeles, to Oregon.
Since Trump has drawn attention to the small but persistent protest outside the Ice facility, and made false claims that Portland is “war ravaged”, a growing number of his supporters, including Maga influencers, have turned up to confront the protesters, which has resulted in fistfights and to a series of arrests, including of Sortor. After an outcry in the conservative media, and from the attorney general, Pam Bondi, charges against Sortor were dropped.
Johnson, a former journalist who reinvented himself as a Christian nationalist influencer after he was fired from Buzzfeed for plagiarism, just shared video of Noem looking down from the roof of the Ice facility at the small group of protesters below, including Jack Dickinson, a protest organizers who wears a chicken costume to mock Trump.
Johnson captioned the video of Noem inspecting the placid scene below: “DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stares down army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit”.
Raskin says Trump's threat to withhold back pay from federal workers after shutdown is illegal
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who represents many federal workers, responded on Tuesday to a leaked White House memo arguing that furloughed federal employees may not be entitled to back pay after a government shutdown ends.
“All federal employees are legally entitled to back pay when the government reopens after a shutdown. I know this because in 2019, I helped pass the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act which made this a requirement. Donald Trump knows this, too—he signed it into law,” Raskin said in a statement.
“Now, as the White House reverses course, the president is threatening to deliberately violate the law; or he is suffering from a debilitating case of legislative amnesia. Either way, he should refresh his memory on the law he signed. And if he chooses to barrel forward anyway, he should get ready for a fight in court,” the Maryland congressman continued.
“The president has no right to just pay the federal workers in his own political camp. That’s a violation of the law and of the First Amendment,” Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, said.
Per my last post, it’s worth noting that Republican congressman Thomas Massie, who is a co-sponsor of the discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein files, has called out the House speaker directly.
Massie said that Johnson is “doing everything he can, including delaying the swearing in of the most recently elected member of Congress and spreading misinformation about the legislation, to block a vote in Congress on legislation to release the Epstein files”.
Johnson says that not swearing in Arizona congresswoman has ‘nothing to do' with Epstein file vote
Also today, House speaker Mike Johnson said that his decision to stave off swearing in representative-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona has “nothing to do” with the fact that she would be the 218th signature on the bipartisan discharge petition – to compel a House vote on the full release of the Epstein files.
“We will swear her in when everybody gets back,” Johnson said, referring to his decision to not call lawmakers back to the hill, in order to jam Democrats and force the Senate to vote on a House-passed funding bill to keep the government funded. “We’re in pro forma session because there is nothing for the House to do. The House has done its job … it’s exactly the same thing that Chuck Schumer voted for in March, so the house will get back to our normal order in doing our job as soon as he votes to reopen the government, because real people’s lives are hanging in the balance right now.”
Edward Helmore
Six former US surgeons general – the top medical posting in Washington – warned in an opinion column published Tuesday that policy changes enacted by health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, are “endangering the health of the nation”.
The surgeons general – Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Vivek Murthy, Antonia Novello and David Satcher – who served under both Republican and Democrat administrations, identified changes in vaccine policy, medical research funding, a shift in priorities from rationality to ideology, plunging morale, and changes to staffing as areas of concern.
Referring to their oaths of office, both Hippocratic as physicians and as public servants, the former officials wrote in the Washington Post that they felt “compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation”.
“Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored,” they said, adding that they could not ignore the “profound, immediate and unprecedented threat” of his policies.
Just a note about votes in the Senate, we’re still waiting for a sixth vote on the dueling stopgap funding bills to be scheduled. Both versions failed for a fifth time on Monday.
A short while ago, the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, left the White House, after his meeting with Donald Trump.
He didn’t answer reporters’ question about how the meeting went.
Soon, Trump is due to host Edan Alexander, the American-Israeli hostage who was released by Hamas earlier this year.
Texas national guard troops arrive in Chicago
Gloria Oladipo
Texas national guard troops have arrived in the Chicago area, marking an escalation of Donald Trump’s crackdown on the city.
Chicago has already seen a ramping up of immigration enforcement in the past few weeks, as well as increasingly violent altercations in the suburb of Broadview, where law enforcement has been filmed deploying teargas and pepper gas against protestors.
The latest military presence comes after April Perry, a US district judge, declined to immediately block troops from entering the city amid a pending lawsuit from the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago against the Trump administration’s actions.
But after Perry’s ruling, the troops were mobilized on Monday, and multiple outlets, including the Chicago Tribune and New York Times confirmed they were remaining in the Chicago area on Tuesday.
Top senate Republican says he assumes workers will get back pay, punts blame to Democrats
At a press conference on Capitol Hill today, John Thune, the top Senate Republican, said he had not seen the new “legal analysis” that suggests federal workers who have been furloughed due to the government shutdown might not be guaranteed back pay.
“My assumption is that furloughed workers will get back pay,” Thune said. “But the broader question here is, the answer to everything right now is open up the government.”
The Republican senator from South Dakota continued to blame lawmakers across the aisle for the shutdown, now on its seventh day:
This government has been shut down by Chuck Schumer and the senate Democrats and it can open up today, and then every of one of those questions becomes an irrelevant question, because we’ll have a functioning government, and everybody will get paid as they should.
What did we learn from Pam Bondi's Senate judiciary committee hearing?
In a tense Senate judiciary committee hearing today, lasting more than four hours, attorney general Pam Bondi sparred with Democratic lawmakers as she faced pushback over the justice department’s enforcement efforts in Democratic-led cities, her handling of the Epstein investigation, and Trump’s weaponizing the Department of Justice (DoJ) to investigate and prosecute his political enemies.
Bondi claimed the department under Trump was “returning to our core mission of fighting real crime”, citing the surge in federal law enforcement activity in Washington DC and Memphis, Tennessee. She also claimed the DOJ was ending the “weaponization of justice”, even as several political adversaries of Trump face federal investigations and prosecutions.
The attorney general frequently parried questions from Democratic lawmakers about her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, a bribery probe into Trump border tsar Tom Homan and the case against former FBI director James Comey by criticizing her questioners in a bold display of partisan political theater – now almost customary when administration officials have testified before congress in recent months.
Throughout the oversight hearing, the attorney general was pressed on the DoJ’s reversal on releasing files on sex trafficking investigations into Epstein, a one-time close friend of Trump, Bondi deflected by accusing Democratic senators of accepting campaign donations from an Epstein associate and played down her comments from earlier this year that the “client list” was “sitting” on her desk for review.
Republican lawmakers generally praised Bondi for her leadership. Texas senator Ted Cruz said the attorney general returned the justice department to “its core function”: “enforcing the law and locking up bad guys”. But colleagues across the aisle had a laundry list of concerns, and pushed Bondi on subjects where she proved evasive.
On the bribery allegations against border tsar Tom Homan, Bondi refused to answer questions from Democratic senators, instead saying that DoJ and FBI officials had found Homan did not commit a crime, and launched personal attacks as she fended off follow-ups. “If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi told the Democratic senator Adam Schiff. “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him?”
Asked about the legal justification for Trump’s moves to deploy national guard troops in US cities, Bondi blamed Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown and said it was jeopardizing public safety. “I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she told Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee.
Bondi also declined to answer questions about Trump’s role in the case against Comey or the arguments by career prosecutors, saying she would not comment on private conversations with the White House or personnel matters. Asked about Trump’s social post calling for Comey’s prosecution, Bondi said: “I don’t think he said anything that he hasn’t said for years.”
Bondi’s testimony followed months of tumult at the justice department as Trump administration officials challenge longstanding norms meant to insulate investigations from political influence and align the department closely with Trump’s agenda. Durbin criticized Bondi for firing career prosecutors and agents who worked on investigations condemned by Trump and scaling back the department’s efforts to combat corruption and white-collar crime. He said:
In eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the justice department and left an enormous stain on American history. It will take decades to recover.
Senator Schiff says justice department has become Trump's ‘personal sword and shield'
A short while ago, senator Adam Schiff said that the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi’s leadership has become Donald Trump’s “personal sword and shield to go after his ever growing list of political enemies and to protect himself his allies and associates”.
Schiff is a noted adversary of the president, who served on the House select committee which investigated the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021.
Bondi snapped back at Schiff today, when she refused to answer questions about the allegations against Tom Homan, the border czar, for accepting $50,000 in bribes prior to Trump taking office: “Deputy attorney general Blanche and [FBI] director Patel said that there was no evidence that Tom Homan committed a crime, yet now you’re putting his picture up to slander him.”
“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi told the Democratic lawmaker from California. “Will you apologize to Donald Trump for trying to impeach him?”
Per my last post, it’s worth noting that House speaker Mike Johnson added that he hasn’t spoken to the White House yet, about the possibility of furloughed federal workers not receiving back pay.
Furloughed government workers may not be entitled to back pay according to White House memo – reports
Government workers who have been furloughed since the government shutdown last week may not be entitled to back pay, according to a memo first obtained by Axios.
In a draft, seen by multiple outlets, office of management and budget (OMB) general counsel Mark Paoletta argues that an amendment to the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act (GEFTA) of 2019, which Trump signed during the last government shutdown, doesn’t guarantee furloughed workers back pay if Congress hasn’t set aside money to compensate them when the government reopens.
The president didn’t promise that back pay was a guarantee while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office today, simply saying that “it depends who we’re talking about” when it comes to the White House’s position on furloughed workers.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have been similarly evasive. Senate majority leader John Thune said today that “the sooner they vote to open up the government, the sooner this becomes a non issue”, while also saying he wasn’t familiar on the exact language of the law. For his part, House speaker Mike Johnson said that there is “new legal analysis” that back pay might “not be appropriate or necessary”.
Democratic lawmakers have already hit back against the administration and their colleagues across the aisle. Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, whose state is home to several thousand federal workers, said any suggestion that paychecks will be withheld is “more fear mongering from a president who wants a blank check for lawlessness”. While congressman Jerry Nadler of New York posted a screenshot on X, and urged the Louisiana Republican to “look at his own website to brush up on what federal law says about federal employees and backpay”. Johnson voted for GEFTA in the last Trump administration, and his website says that “under federal law, employees are entitled to back pay upon the government reopening”.
Trump says he will announce in five days which government programs and jobs will be ‘permanently eliminated'
Trump says his administration plans to eliminate a number of government programs as a result of the ongoing shutdown, adding that he would provide details on job cuts within the next four or five days.
He says he has identified programs to shut down, and he’ll be “announcing it pretty soon, but we have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate and permanently eliminate.”
He says the Democrats handed him the opportunity to do so “on a silver platter”.
“I’ll be able to tell you that in four or five days, if this keeps going on,” he adds. “It’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back.”
Asked what his message was to Democrats ahead of another short-term spending bill vote, Trump accuses Democrats of a kamikaze attack.
This is like a kamikaze attack. Well, they’re the ones that started it … and it’s almost like a kamikaze attack by them. You want to know the truth, this is like a kamikaze attack … they have nothing to lose.
Trump says US will do ‘everything possible to make sure everyone adheres to the deal' once deal is reached for Gaza
Asked by a reporter what guarantees he’s giving that Israel won’t resume its offensive once it gets the hostages back, Trump stresses that the US has “a lot of power” and says that once they have a deal, the US “is going to do everything possible to make sure everyone adheres to the deal”.
