AP doesn't mention that government workers will receive their back pay after the shutdown as they have in all shutdowns.
10/5/13, "Furloughed Texan Cruz supporters to America: ‘You’ve got to stand up’," AP, via Washington Times, Houston
"Thanks to Texas’ new senator, Dale Huls is out of a job — at least for now. Yet Huls has never been prouder that he voted for him.
“Without Ted Cruz this doesn’t happen,” said Huls, a NASA systems engineer who was among roughly 3,000 federal employees furloughed from Houston’s Johnson Space Center after tea party Republicans triggered the partial government
shutdown.“This is something Americans have to get used to,” said Huls. “Even if it affects your livelihood, you’ve got to stand up.”
Perhaps more than anywhere else, Texas embodies the factors behind the shutdown: big government and the rebellion against it.
The state is one of the richest beneficiaries of federal spending, with its sprawling military bases, Gulf Coast seaports, and nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico, which help account
for more than 131,500 full-time federal employees. Only California, Virginia and the District of Columbia have more.Yet Cruz’s firebrand opposition to the nation’s new entitlement program — the Affordable Care Act — and his campaign to stop government growth at all costs were also born here, and resonate deeply with many conservatives. In Houston, home to thousands of federal workers and to Cruz himself, the shutdown has brought the love/hate relationship with government into plain view.
Huls said he doesn’t believe his job is a waste of money
: “The public doesn’t think much of federal workers these days, but we’re people with car payments just like everyone else.”Still, he said of Cruz, “He’s fighting for what he believes in and I’m taking a side.”...
A rising tea party star, Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012. He carried Harris County by 18,000 votes, even though it includes Houston’s minority population and government workers. He had been in office barely nine months when took to the Senate floor for a 21-plus-hour quasi-filibuster decrying the health care law, and then led an effort to block a budget
deal with Democrats.Cruz supporters tend to make a distinction between government workers and government. The former can be worthwhile; the latter is taking on too much and must be pruned to its essential functions. In a Pew Research Center poll this week, 41 percent of conservative Republicans expressed anger at the federal government, up from 32 percent in 2011 and just 5 percent in 2006....
NASA is the hardest-hit federal agency in terms of furloughs, with 97 percent of its 18,000-plus employees nationwide sent home. At Johnson Space Center, only about 200 civilians remain working because they protect
property and life, like two U.S. astronauts and four others currently aboard the International Space Station.
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