By Albert Lea Tribune and Associated Press

 

The congressional delegation representing southern Minnesota announced this week they will donate their salaries to charities during the government shutdown.

Though many federal workers cannot draw pay during the shutdown, congressional members do.

U.S. Sen. Al Franken, DFL-Minneapolis, and U.S. House Rep. Tim Walz, DFL-Mankato, said their pay will go toward hunger relief organizations that serve Minnesota. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minneapolis, said her pay will go toward medical research.

The shutdown went into effect Tuesday amid a budget impasse in Congress, leaving 800,000 federal workers idled and most nonessential government services halted for the first time in 17 years.

“I believe that while the government is shut down, donating my salary to charity is the right thing to do, and I’m going to make sure that money goes toward helping people who might be badly affected by the shutdown,” said Franken, who is donating his salary to Second Harvest Heartland, an organization that works across the Upper Midwest.

Walz, DFL-Mankato, said he will donate his pay to the Emergency Community Help Organization Food Shelf of Mankato and Rochester’s Channel One Regional Food Bank. “The political games and governing by crisis attitude must end,” Walz said. “Hard-working families are suffering because of the uncompromising, reckless attitude of a few rigid ideologues in Washington. That isn’t right and it isn’t fair. That is why I will donate my pay to charity.”

Klobuchar’s spokeswoman, Brigit Helgen, said the senator is giving her pay to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health because medical research is being slashed during the shutdown.

The government limped into a third day of partial shutdown today after a White House meeting among President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders yielded no signs of progress but plenty of evidence that Democrats and Republicans remained riven over a dispute that has idled hundreds of thousands of federal workers and curtailed services nationwide.

“The House could act today to reopen the government and stop the harm this shutdown is causing to the economy and families across the country,” the White House said in a written statement after the session. In a jab at the GOP-led chamber, it added, “The president remains hopeful that common sense will prevail.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, complained to reporters that Obama had said anew that “he will not negotiate.” Boehner made clear that curbing the health care overhaul that Obama pushed into law three years ago remains part of the price for returning 800,000 furloughed federal workers to their jobs and resuscitating programs ranging from feeding pregnant women to staffing Internal Revenue Service call centers.

“All we’re asking for here is a discussion and fairness for the American people under Obamacare,” Boehner said, using the name Republicans often use for the 2010 law.

Wednesday’s lack of progress did little to dispel the widening impression that the dispute could persist into mid-October and become tangled with an even more consequential battle.