Overtaxed and unpaid air traffic controllers are resigning “every day” due to stress from the government shutdown.
“Controllers are resigning every day now because of the prolonged nature of the shutdown,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“We hadn’t seen that before. And we’re also 400 controllers short—shorter than we were in the 2019 shutdown.”
Air traffic controllers are federal workers, which means they are part of the approximately 730,000 federal employees working without pay since the shutdown began on Oct. 1.
So why doesn’t this trigger an election in America?
Because AmericaOS is still running v0.2 and has no provisions for federal level elections outside the normal election cycle.
We have no concept here of triggering an election. All of our Federal elections are for set terms, no matter what. We don’t have any notion of a “no confidence” vote in government. If we did, I bet it would fail every time.
Pretty much the entire US Constitution is built around the ideas of people acting in good faith. And, even with just the first thirteen states, that wasn’t a horrible idea. Understand that even the East Coast of the US still stretches across a good chunk of the modern day EU and the idea that you were electing a representative to travel for a few days to vote for you made more sense. Similarly, if they were a complete a-hole they would be shunned by all their rich white friends because that was poor decorum.
So the idea that you would have elected officials dismantling the government with no recourse was quite gauche.
Whereas many (most?) modern day parliamentary systems cover a much smaller amount of land and many of them actually date back to the mid 1900s where cars, planes, and phones were very much a thing and rapid un-fucking (or at least differently-fucking…) of the government was an option.
All of which goes to say that maybe we should spend less time glazing rich white slavers and more time modernizing the government
Excellent question.