Republicans Hate Veterans
Submitted by Anastasia Pantsios on Wed, 09/19/2012 - 6:37pm.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/republican-objections-to...
OK, maybe you don't like the word "hate." But there is no denying they ooze contempt for veterans and consider them insignificant collateral damage in their war against President Obama's second term — even though the war is pretty much lost.
Today, 40 Senate Republicans voted against a jobs bill that would have put veterans back to work doing things like bolstering police and fire departments, and working in national parks. As usual, the Republicans are running around screeching "Spending! Spending!," something they did not do when these men and women were being sent to war.
One of Oklahoma's two Senate idiots (once voted worst Senate tandem by a progressive web site), Tom Coburn, is falsely claiming that reducing the debt is the best way to help veterans. In fact, reducing the debt as a priority move will simply destroy the economy for everyone because it will siphon money and resources out of the economy. Putting veterans back to work would help because then they would be paying taxes again, and not "mooching" off the government as Mitt Romney claims they are doing now (and yes, veterans make up a significant part of Romney's 47% of people so lazy and dependent on government they deserve only scorn).
Interestingly, several Republicans voted with the Democrats, including Scott Brown of Massachusetts who, recent polls are showing, is falling behind Democrat Elizabeth Warren. (The others were Dean Heller of Nevada, the Main twins, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, and Republican independent Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who owes little to her part after she was primaried in 2010 and won as an independent).
But here's something I don't get. There was a time when you did everything you could to avoid having a vote such as this on the record because it was pure ammo for your opponent. It was like swallowing a poison pill toxic to your campaign. It was a vote easily understood and hated by almost everyone. Is there no political cost anymore, or have most Senate Republicans gotten so arrogant and out of touch with reality that they just believe they can get away with ANYTHING?
There's something else that's frosting me. The vote was 58-40 in favor of the legislation — so it failed.
In other words, it garnered almost a landslide number of votes. But thanks to the Senate's filibuster rules and the current crop of Republicans' egregious misuse of them, it failed anyway.
Harry Reid has vowed this will change if the Democrats keep control of the Senate — that once again a filibuster means a real filibuster. Which means you will have to be committed to stopping a bill, just like in the old days when a Senator would stay on the floor of the Senate and read the phone book. You cannot just THREATEN to filibuster, as Republicans have done with a staggering record number of bills during this past session, a clear abuse of the rules.
It's time that stopped. That's one more reason to put more Democrats in the Senate and to keep the ones we have, like Senator Sherrod Brown.
