House Republicans plan performance art on the House floor

The piece of performance art that will be launched next week on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by House Republicans in a vain attempt to repeal the historic health care insurance reform bill passed last March will add, if successful, $230 billion in the first decade and roughly one-half of one percent of GDP, or over a trillion dollars, in the second decade, to the budget deficit, according to a report by the independent and bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Of course, Republicans immediately tried to discredit the CBO that they routinely use when they get results they want, and new Speaker of the House John “The crying man” Boehner dismissed the report and released a report of his own. The Boner accused the Democrats of somehow rigging the report. Perhaps he missed the part about the CBO being independent and non-partisan. Instead, the Republicans made up their own facts in a report that got the results they wanted.

Who would you believe; an independent, nonpartisan fiscal agency or the Boner.
This lame attempt to overturn a popular and historic law is another waste of time. If it gets enough votes in the House, which it should, it will never get out of the Senate, and on Thursday, the President made it clear he will veto the bill if by some miracle it gets out of the Senate.

In a statement of administration policy released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the administration said that repeal would "would explode the deficit, raise costs for the American people and businesses, deny an estimated 32 million people health insurance, and take us back to the days when insurers could deny, limit or drop coverage for any American."

"If the President were presented with H.R. 2, he would veto it," the statement said, emphasizing this with an underline.

But political theatre is nothing new to Republicans; like Thursday when they killed an hour and a half to read the U.S. Constitution line by line, at least the parts they liked, on the floor of the House on opening day of the 112th Congress.

Republicans have a history of performing and pandering for the teabaggers, and this was no different. The farce even had a birther disrupt the proceedings.

Perhaps they are not aware that all laws must pass constitutional muster before the third equal branch of government, the judiciary. Apparently, some Republicans skipped the reading, and they did not hear the part where only members of Congress can vote and make motions on the House floor.

Rep. Pete Sessions, R- Texas, made a motion to open the first act of the GOP’s performance of repealing health care insurance reform, an action that can only be taken by an official member of Congress. Sessions, however, missed Wednesday’s swearing-in ceremony while he and fellow Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Penn, attended a fundraiser.

GOP wants to abolish the 14th Amendment

Fear mongering has long been a stable of the Republican campaign platform, and illegal immigration from Mexico is the latest issue to the GOP has grabbed onto.

With high unemployment, Republicans and teabaggers have jumped all over illegal immigration with the false claim that they are taking American jobs, while ignoring the people actually hiring them at substandard wages. The recently passed Arizona unconstitutional racist “show-me-your-papers” law is little more than another attempt by Republicans to suppress minority voting.

The fact is deportations are up under President Obama. In fact, the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of undocumented workers and auditing hundreds of businesses that blithely hire undocumented workers. According toe CBS News, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007.

That begs the questions, where were the teabaggers when Bush was ignoring the immigration problem, just like they were silent was Bush was running the economy into the ground and turning a budget surplus into a deficit?

Not only has President Obama sent the National Guard to patrol the border with Mexico, just today he signed into law a $600 million border security measure that will put more agents and equipment along the Mexican border. It will fund the hiring of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents to be deployed at critical areas along the border, as well as more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It also provides for new communications equipment and greater use of unmanned surveillance drones.

As expected, that will not sway GOP teabaggers from making the false claim that the federal government is not securing the border nor will Obama get any credit.

Teabaggers and other prominent Republicans, including Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, are now calling for repealing the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all people born in the United States to combat the so-called “anchor babies.”

The 14th Amendment is one of the three Reconstruction Amendments, adopted in 1868 to ensure freed slaves are citizens of the United States. Its Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses have gone a long way toward combating institutional racism and equality.

Republicans claim that people enter the country illegally in order to have children who are automatically U.S. citizens and who will "anchor" their parents to America.

Lindsey told Faux “news” that “people come here to have babies. They come here to drop a child. It's called 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."

The problem with that rant is that the facts do not bear that out. According to an AP story, “People who study patterns of illegal immigration say that this statement is probably not true in the vast number of birthright citizenship cases. The co-author of the Pew study told Time's Kate Pickert that "well over 80 percent" of the 340,000 births to an illegal immigrant in 2008 were to a mother who had been in the country for at least a year, suggesting they did not come to the country specifically to have a child. And "birth tourism" — in which people purportedly come to America specifically to have a child and then return with the child to their country — seems to be relatively uncommon.”

This is really a non-issue because children have to “wait until they are 21 to seek legal status for an illegal-immigrant parent. According to Politifact, "Only 4,000 unauthorized immigrants can receive such status per year, and the alien has to have been in the U.S. for at least 10 years."”

Clearly, we need comprehensive immigration reform.

I guess if Republicans want to abolish an amendment, perhaps they can look at the 2nd Amendment. After all, a well regulated militia is called the National Guard and the U.S. Army.

Newspaper puts a face on the people Senate Republicans stiffed

The Livingston County Daily Press & Argus did an excellent job on Sunday putting a face on the thousands of people in Michigan losing their unemployment benefits because the U.S. Senate Republicans chose to filibuster a bill that will allow a six-month extension of unemployment benefits and Medicaid funding.

Joyce Smith is a 62 year-old Conway Township resident who has worked her entire life and never asked for any help or handouts, but she has been unable to find a job in the Bush recession - the worst recession since the Great Depression - since she was laid off from her job at a large architectural/engineering firm.

“Her unemployment benefits, which allowed her to hang onto her house and pay utilities, will end in three weeks.“ Like many people in the country, Smith doesn't have health insurance and risks losing everything she's worked hard to get in her life.

"This is going to hurt us really bad," Smith said. "This is what has kept us afloat. It's like we don't have any hope."

She gets angry thinking about senators who didn't support extending the benefits. She knows unemployment benefits are supposed to be only temporary, and she would much rather work than receive money from the government. However, she said, Michigan is in trouble.

Smith is just one of 1,572 residents who lost their unemployment benefits last month, and by end of July, 1,486 more residents will lose unemployment benefits, according toe the P & A.

Republicans are doing everything they can to stall the economic recovery, as well as to continue their war to kill the middle class.

We now hear that some Republicans think people on unemployment don’t want to work and would rather collect unemployed than work. Republicans think those who can’t find a job right now are lazy, shiftless and “welfare cheats.” That is just absurd.

Smith said it best.

"There are no jobs out there," Smith said. "These people are really in need.""I'm not freeloading, if that's what they think. Let them lose their jobs and see what they think.”

The American people got a glimpse of how much Republicans abhor the middle class and working people. U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R - OH, said last week he wants to raise the retirement age to collect full Social Security benefits to age 70.

Social Security is the major source of income for most of the elderly, and nine out of 10 individuals age 65 and older receive Social Security benefits.

The solution to keeping SS solvent past 2052 is pretty simple. Payroll taxes are only withheld from US workers' paychecks on the first $97,000 of their annual incomes. Raising that cap would address the problem.

Somehow, I doubt Republicans will sign on to that solution, and it seems they would rather see people work until they die.