Judge Robert Conrad, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, in a memo, opens new tab distributed to judges and other court officials nationally, said the judiciary currently estimates it could sustain operations only through October 3.
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Conrad acknowledged the short duration was a “very sharp change” from how the courts were able to sustain paid operations for the entirety of a five-week shutdown that began in December 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
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Should money run out, judges and Supreme Court justices would still get paid, thanks to a constitutional bar against a diminution in their pay. But law clerks, probation officers, and other employees would not.
Archived at https://archive.is/9ODqj
https://thehill.com/newsletters/the-gavel/5529645-shutdown-threatens-court-operations/
So, the courts won’t close entirely, but may seek to delay some (perhaps most) activities that can be delayed. All that stuff requires court staff. While there will be some staff who are outright furloughed and forced to stay home, “supporting the exercise of the Judiciary’s constitutional functions” logically requires some law clerks to come to work – otherwise Judges would be doing all that work themselves, and we can’t have that now, can we?
Good info, thank you! I think that spokesperson is doing a bit of a “This is fine” meme here and I’ll be really curious to see how they decide what is or isn’t essential here. Also, really curious to see how much unpaid work they’ll be able to get out of their law clerks before those people start pushing back. It’s definitely a complicated situation with unclear rules and a lot of dishonest and selfish people so really hard to say where this goes.
I feel like the Administration is starving the court budget on purpose, in order to derail the multiple court cases against it. If this turns into a protracted shutdown, it will be interesting to see whether those court cases will be delayed (and whether other court cases pushed by the administration and the President himself go forward)…