This Week in Washington
January 28, 2011
Dear Friend,
I’d like to share with you some of the things that went on this week in Washington:
I rose in strong opposition Tuesday to House Resolution 38, a reckless GOP attempt to grant all federal budget allocating authority to one individual – the Chairman of the Budget Committee. H.Res 38 claims to reduce ‘non-security’ spending to fiscal year 2008 levels or less – a questionable claim in the absence of as much as one final budget number or specific cut.
In a nutshell, this one-page Resolution would enable one man (House Republican Paul Ryan) to decide how to administer massive cuts across the budget and send us back to 2008 – one of the worst years for our economy since the Great Depression.
The reason we declared independence from Great Britain and set up a democracy was to avoid rule by a king. Why then would we give king-like powers to a House committee chairman?
I strongly oppose such irresponsibility. We need to come together – when we actually have the budget numbers – to decide on the most judicious, effective cuts and meaningful investments in order to reduce the deficit while continuing our economic progress.
President Obama did a fine job of outlining this very necessity in his 2011 State of the Union address Tuesday night. Thanks to his fine leadership, we are steadily recovering from a massive economic downturn. In order to continue this forward movement our President asked us to find common ground on which to build, innovate, educate, and invest in America.
President Obama is correct that now more than ever we must put aside our differences to work toward these common goals of American solvency and American greatness.
To read my full response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, click here.
The day after President Obama implored Congress to put party politics aside and work together for the benefit of our country’s future, Republicans showed a troubling little willingness to do so. On Wednesday they voted to do away with the Presidential Public Financing System, originally set up to level the playing field for aspiring new leaders and the general public vis à vis rich candidates and those backed by big money corporations and special interests.
The elimination of the Presidential Public Financing System could redouble the harmful effects of last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. the FEC which opened the floodgates for limitless corporate and special interest spending in our elections.
Just as they did with H.Res 38, Republicans pushed through this legislation as quickly as possible in an attempt to bypass the proceedings that ensure thoroughness in our legislature body. They complained that we passed health insurance reform too quickly after debating the issue for over half a century and after the legislation spent more than a year in Congress. Yet this week the Republican majority had us vote on a bill introduced only six days earlier.
Taking a chain saw to the budget and cutting programs such as the Presidential Public Financing System are the wrong approaches to reducing the deficit. They remove transparency and safeguards that make our democracy work better at a relatively slim cost, but they do not address the major drains: military spending and health care costs, the latter of which the health insurance reform law addressed to reduce the deficit by an estimated $230 billion over the next ten years.
It seems the Republicans have picked up right where they left off before President Obama’s entreaty for unity. Maybe they need a weekend to allow our President’s words to fully sink in and to realize there is plenty of middle ground where we can come together to move forward. When and if they wake up, we will be there ready to collaborate. In the meantime there is plenty of work to do and with or without our Republican counterparts, we must move forward.
With every good wish,
Sincerely,
John Dingell
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