Looking through The Washington Post’s list of which members of Congress are going to refuse their pay during the current government shutdown, one gets the impression of being at a convention of master illusionists.

House members and Senators make $174,000 a year, and the law requires constitutional positions like theirs – and those of the president and vice-president – be paid during the shutdown, even though thousands of federal employees won’t be getting paychecks during the furlough.

We know, looks kind of bad, huh?

Well, those elected officials realize that, so scores of members have said they will not take their pay as long as those other federal workers don’t get paid.

The Post list is a bipartisan one, as you might expect, because grandstanding is a bipartisan endeavor.

But this is Congress, after all – the place that has turned word games into high art – so a member saying they will not take their pay does not mean they will be giving up the actual money.

As usual, the devil is in the details.

The Constitution says that Congress must be paid during the shutdown because members are not allowed to change their own pay status.

But some members have asked the head of administrative services – the paymaster – to “withhold my pay” until the shutdown is over.

Which is not the same thing as giving up the money. They still can collect every penny of it after the shutdown is over and the spotlight has turned elsewhere. It’s an example of congressional sleight-of-hand.

Others have said they’re going to put the money in escrow, which is Congress-speak for “show me the money as soon as it’s politically prudent to do so.”

And then there are those who have said they will donate their shutdown pay to charity. They’ll still get checks, regardless of the shutdown status. That includes New Hampshire’s two U.S. Senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte, and Reps. Ann Kuster and Carol Shea-Porter, all of whom said this week that they will make charitable donations.

Which is not the same thing as not receiving a paycheck, though contributing to charity seems like a reasonable trade-off in this case, as long as the contributions amount to the full amount they will receive during the shutdown. Anything less strikes us as trying to score the political points without experiencing the pain in the wallet.

Members of Congress gross about $476 per day ($174,000 divided by 365 days in a year) which is a week’s pay for a lot of people. If members want to be honest about it, we think they should donate the equivalent of $476 a day to charity. That works out to about $3,346 per week.

The clock is ticking.

Who’s not on the Post’s list, you may wonder? Well, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has made himself the face of this deadlock debacle, wasn’t on there as of late Thursday afternoon and is presumably still looking forward to banking his next paycheck.

He did, after all, speak on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours last week, railing against the Affordable Care Act that Republicans have sought to defund or delay, leading to the current impasse.

Maybe Cruz thinks he’s entitled to it as a sort of combat pay for his noble efforts.

But try telling that to a single mother who can’t get milk for her infant because the Women, Infants and Children program is shut down.

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