GOP's Latest Hostage: Air Traffic Control and Safety

By now, the repugs have proven themselves to be rabid ferrets: beyond negotiating, beyond logic, beyond reason. The only thing you can do is hit them with a shovel.

Steve Benen:

In the House version of the FAA measure, Republicans included a measure to make it much more difficult for aviation and rail workers to unionize. The larger dynamic can get a little complicated, but the bottom line is this: under the status quo, workers can get together and hold a vote. The majority wins. Under the Republican proposal, workers who don’t participate in the vote would be counted as “no” votes. The point, of course, would be to make it extremely difficult for workers to organize.

SNIP

The White House weighed in today with a Statement of Administration Policy, explaining that the administration supports another temporary extension, but won’t accept the House GOP scheme to deliberately punish rural airports as part of a childish, partisan scheme.

And if this isn’t resolved fairly soon, the FAA would be shutdown. Air traffic controllers, designated “essential workers,” would remain on the job, but 16,000 other FAA employees would face furloughs.

Imagine, just for a moment, how much smoother the U.S. government would function if the House Republican caucus included grown-ups — or if the caucus were back in the minority.

Imagine, just for a moment, how much smoother government would run if Congressional Democrats had the balls to respond to this kind of infantile idiocy with "You want absent votes to count as No? Here's our counter: Absent votes count as Yes. Choke on that, Kochsuckers."