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While thousands of low-income Americans are suffering under sequestration, our Congress somehow managed to rush through a fix for the FAA cuts that were delaying their their flights. Imagine that! As Chris Hayes discussed in the opening of his show this Friday, it's so nice to see that those members of Congress have got their priorities in order.

HAYES: But we begin tonight with the big flashing headline breaking news of the day, from the least popular branch of government, the branch of government widely seen as the most dysfunctional branch of government, the one that contains the right-wing Republican House caucus committed to obstruction above all else. In that branch of government today, today we saw a remarkable display of urgency and pragmatic bipartisan problem solving come together in a matter of hours to fix the most pressing trouble facing America today.

And that very pressing problem is extended travel delays for frequent flyers and members of Congress. Yes, it was a long and tortured path to triumph on this issue. but today in a 361 to 41 vote, a resounding margin, House of Representatives overwhelmingly agreed to tackle the scourge of flight delays being caused by the furlough of federal aviation workers.

Sadly the first piece of legislation that members of Congress saw fit to pass will make those lines at the airports shorter, and as Hayes reminded his audience, here's who will not be getting relief from the bill passed this Friday.

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A depressed Florida man shot his wife and two children before killing himself after closing his hot air balloon business and facing losing his job as a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspector because of automatic budget cuts known as "sequestration."

A source told CBS News that 45-year-old Carlos Zuniga was depressed in the weeks before he shot his wife 43-year-old wife, Michelle, his 14-year-old daughter, Lauren, and his 11-year-old son, Stefan. Carlos Zuniga then killed himself.

Stefan Zuniga died at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center on Thursday morning. Both the wife and the daughter were in critical condition.

According to The Miami Herald, Carlos Zuniga was in the process of shutting down Winds Aloft Aviation Inc., a hot air balloon business that he had started with this wife in 2005. He had recently taken a job as a safety inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration. But the FAA is expected to be forced to furlough a "vast majority" of it's employees because of automatic budget cuts in the so-called "sequester" if Congress does not act quickly.

"FAA is going to face a cut of roughly $600 million under sequester," Office of Management and Budget controller Danny Werfel told a Senate committee last week. "A vast majority of their 47,000 employees will be furloughed for one day per pay period for the rest of the year, and, as importantly, this is going to reduce air traffic levels across the country, causing delays and disruptions for all travelers."

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has also notified senators that allowing the automatic cuts "would force the FAA to undergo an immediate retrenchment of core functions."

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama warned that there would be stark consequences if Congress allowed the automatic cuts to take place.

"These cuts are not smart," Obama said on Tuesday. "They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. This is not an abstraction -- people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again."

Former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour on Tuesday told Fox Business that "I hope and believe that Republicans will allow the sequestration to go into effect, so that we can start down a path of trying to get control of spending and reduce the deficit."

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday said that she would be willing force a "thoughtful" shutdown of parts of the United States government if President Barack Obama did not agree to deep spending cuts.

"What we want to make certain is that this president, this administration, this bureaucracy realizes that kicking the can must stop," she told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "It is spending cuts and it is imperative that we reduce the size of the federal government, that we get in on a mega-diet, that we end this out-of-control spending."

"There is the option of government shutdown," the Tennessee Republican continued. "There is an option of raising the debt ceiling in short-term increments... There's also the plan of three dollars in cuts for every one dollar of debt limit increase. So, the healthy thing is this, we are having a good discussion on it."

Jansing pointed to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center which found that the government could continue to fund interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps during a shutdown -- but it would mean that almost every other federal program would grind to a halt.

"[B]ut doing all that will mean defaulting on everything — really, everything — else," The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote last week. "The FBI will shut down. The people responsible for tracking down loose nukes will lose their jobs. The prisons won’t operate. The biomedical researchers won’t be funded. The court system will close its doors. The tax refunds won’t go out. The Federal Aviation Administration will go offline. The parks will close. Food safety inspections will cease."

"I think that there is a way to avoid default," Blackburn insisted. "If it requires shutting down certain portions of the government, let's look at that. Let's put these option on the table, be very thoughtful, but get this spending pattern broken. We cannot afford a $4 billion a day deficit and trillion dollar plus deficits every single year."

"So, it requires thoughtfulness and it requires that we are going to have a plan to work through this. I think that's where we as Republicans are headed."