Unwise Moves Cut Both Ways

While both houses of Congress are technically off for another week, their latest example of being disconnected from constituents is a cut above (or below) their usual antics. This past weekend, the GOP-led House made sure to take another few whacks at everyone who isn't counted as among the top two percent of this nation's richest folk - and then they went on vacation.

Based on the actions of previous Republican Congresses, it wasn't really a surprise to any of us that the current GOP-led House passed their latest attempt at a Continuing Resolution (C.R.) at 4:40AM this past Saturday morning.

Sadly, it also didn't surprise us much that Republicans are sending the Senate a budget bill that will never make it through final passage.

The braggadocio, trash talk, and willful ignorance of more important issues we're seeing coming from some - but not all - in the Republican Party on budget issues is very reminiscent of the actions of a cornered bully. Persons like this, in our collective experience, will often strike out at anyone - including women, children, and the elderly - when forced to face up to the ugly reality and uncomfortable effects of their actions.

The Republican-led House followed that behavioral example in submitting their Continuing Resolution, which included gutting funding for PBS, killing funding for NPR, attempting to defund the health care insurance reform bill, hacking away at portions of the E.P.A., and stripping non-abortion funding of family planning clinics (including funding for Planned Parenthood).

We pointedly mention that not all Republicans seem entirely on board with all of these actions because some Congressional Republicans have displayed some true budgetary wisdom recently.

Most of us proudly cheered the vote of many Congressional Republicans last week who joined the President, the Secretary of Defense, and virtually every Democratic member of both chambers when they voted to kill the unnecessary second military jet engine funding. It was a wise and sane cut, one that the Speaker of the House, Republican leader John Boehner, was not truly in favor of. Unfortunately, that kind of sensible bipartisan budget cutting wisdom is rare.

The end result of all this random cutting is that the people who can least afford to be cut off at the knees - the middle class and the poor - appear to once again be the targets of the current Republican Congressional leadership.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest two percent of Americans and the corporations those wealthy folks control were asked to sacrifice little if anything.

We say this not with irony, but with concern for those who seem to be turning a purposeful blind eye to reality:  there have been many other governments throughout history who have also attempted to pile significant and unwise cuts on the majority of their citizens at inappropriate times.

As the French revolutionaries showed Marie Antoinette and King Louis, and more recently, as the Egyptian people showed Hosni Mubarak, those kinds of cuts can work both ways.

Before the House released this funding bill, many people (including us) warned Congressional Republican leaders, more than once, to think very carefully before they swung their budget axes. The cuts the Republican leadership put into their bill would result in even more financial penalties that would test the pain resistance of the middle class, if they were ever enacted - and the Republican leadership knows this.

Yet they passed their slashed and cut version of the Continuing Resolution funding bill anyway.

Apparently, those frenzied Republicans must have also cut off their own ears before they heard our warnings.