Republicans’ skewed priorities

By Weekly Archive On Jun 30, 2010

The U.S. Senate last week rejected a bill, the “American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010,” that would have extended unemployment benefits to 1.2 million long-term unemployed Americans who have exhausted their eligibility.

In effect, the Republican minority in the Senate has elected to throw the long-term unemployed victims of the economic crisis under a bus.

The proposed law was opposed by every Republican in the Senate. Only one Democrat, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, who often votes with Republicans, opposed the bill. The final vote, 57 for to 41 against, would be considered a landslide in any democratic election. But the Senate is not a democracy. Because of the Senate’s filibuster rule — and the Republicans’ abuse of it in order to torpedo Obama’s agenda — 60 votes are now needed to pass virtually any legislation. Senate Majority Leader Reid and the Democrats failed by three votes.

Over the last few weeks, Reid had presented several progressively more watered-down versions of the bill in the hopes of obtaining some GOP votes. But he failed to obtain a single GOP vote even for the most watered-down version. In the wake of the latest defeat, Reid said he would move on to other business.

The bill would have extended benefits for long-term unemployed workers until November 2010. Estimates are that unless the bill is revived in some form, as many as 2 million unemployed workers would lose benefits by July 10.

The Republicans’ disregard for jobless American workers contrasts with the slavish solicitude they bestow on even the most justifiably reviled corporations. About the same time that Republicans were denying the meager sums the jobless desperately need to make car payments and buy groceries, Republican Rep. Joe L. Barton was offering an abject apology to the chairman of BP, the worst corporate outlaw in the oil business, whose spill is progressively destroying the economy and ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.
At a Hearing in the House of Representatives, Barton said that the $20 billion escrow fund that President Barack Obama was able to extract from BP CEO Tony Hayward –intended to compensate those who have sustained economic losses from the spill — was a “shakedown.”

Barton’s apology was no slip of the tongue uttered by a clueless rookie member of Congress. Barton is the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and his apology was part of prepared remarks. They echoed the position of arguably a majority of the Republicans in the House. Shortly before Barton’s apology, the Republican Study Committee, which is touted as representing a majority of House Republicans, issued a statement that described the BP fund as an example of “Chicago-style shakedown politics.”

As the Baltimore Sun editorialized: “What makes the incident such a touchstone is not that Mr. Barton’s opinions ran counter to mainstream Republican thought on big business versus big government but that they hewed so closely.” Indeed, House Republicans disregarded public outrage at Barton and refused to remove him from his powerful chairmanship. Also offering a vote of confidence to Rep. Barton, ultra-right wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who once advocated an investigation to root out socialists in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Yet Republican priorities don’t really represent a GOP preference for big business versus big government. What they really represent is their preference for corporate interests over the interests of workers and the majority of the American people. They have proved this in spades over the last two decades by lowering taxes for the super-rich and disregarding the interests of the poor and the middle class. As a result, over the last three decades the income of 90 percent of Americans have stagnated, and today we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any developed country in the world.

GOP callousness for the downtrodden knows no bounds: At a time when there are six job applicants for every job vacancy, many Republicans have voiced the opinion that extending unemployment benefits creates an incentive for the jobless to refrain from looking for work. At the same time they obstruct any spending to help the economy recover from the hole that Obama inherited from the Bush administration, they refuse to offer any relief for the victims.

There is still a dim hope for the extension of unemployment benefits. The “American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010” included several provisions besides the unemployment extension, some of which were objectionable to Republicans. Now Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, one of the few Republicans who on occasion votes against the GOP leadership, has asked Majority Leader Reid to present a standalone bill that would include only the unemployment benefits extension. This time, there will be no excuse if Republicans choose not to extend a hand to millions of unemployed Americans at a time of national economic crisis.