A federal judge just issued a ruling on the government shutdown and whether or not workers had to be paid, as the Daily Mail reports:

A federal judge decided Tuesday that he won’t intervene in the 25-day-old government shutdown, refusing to force the Trump administration to release 780,000 unpaid federal workers from employment limbo.

Judge Richard Leon denied petitions from two government employees’ unions and their members for a temporary restraining order that would have ended the practice of making some workers perform their duties without salaries and requiring others to stay home without earning money at other jobs.

Leon said after hearing oral arguments that he sympathized with out-of-work federal employees. But the shutdown ‘squabble,’ he ruled, shouldn’t be solved by using federal courts as a source of leverage by one side of a dispute against another.

Some workers claim Trump is violating their Fifth Amendment rights by taking their property – their salaries – without due process. Others say he’s unconstitutionally treating them like slaves, forcing them to work for free without sufficient reason.

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The National Treasury Employees Union and National Air Traffic Controllers Association say forcing government employees to work without pay violates the U.S. Constitution and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The air traffic controllers’ lawsuit contends that government employees’ salaries are their ‘property,’ and depriving them of that compensation without a sufficient reason runs counter to the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no one can be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’

Their members, the union said, shouldn’t be ‘distracted by financial issues … caused by the government’s unlawful taking of their property without due process.’

This is as it should be, and the judge made the right decision in our opinion.