Dear Friend,

After a productive district work period back home in the 15th, I returned to Washington last week hopeful that my Republican colleagues were returning from their own home districts reminded of what our country needs most: jobs.  I was hopeful that like any good representative, they’d return to Washington with their people’s interests in mind, ready to work towards a reasonable, job-creating fiscal policy so we could finally pass a long overdue budget for 2011.

Instead I returned to a glorious mess where fundamentalist tea-party politics are on the verge of causing a government shut-down.

The 2011 Fiscal Year is more than half over. We should have been able to come together, overcome our differences, and pass a budget months ago. Just like in any business or household, planning a budget is a basic but integral part of our job responsibilities. Without a current budget for federal offices, agencies or programs to plan and function within, there’s no prospect of moving our country forward.

Instead of doing their job, Republicans are letting a tea party contingent lead us nowhere, offering nothing more than measly stopgap measures to budget one or two weeks at a time. This isn’t just bad policy-making; this is negligence.

With a government shutdown looming for lack of current budget funding, House Republicans have decided to focus on next year’s budget blueprint (after all, blueprints for the future are much easier and more politically popular than solving current problems).

The 2012 blueprint clearly conveys the priorities of the Grand Old Party: tax cuts for the rich and corporate; funding cuts to programs that serve the old, the poor and the vulnerable.

First the Republican majority attacked health insurance reform. Then they went after the environment and women’s reproductive rights. Then they attacked our National Public Radio. Now Republicans want to eliminate two and a half years of progress, cut funding and abrogate Medicaid at the Federal level, and privatize Medicare. They want to turn the clocks back to 2008-level funding, while giving corporations and the richest two percent a big tax break. I won’t stand for it.

I won’t stand for it not only because it’s another incident of Republicans trying to take a chain saw to the programs and agencies that make our country work for its people. I won’t stand for it because these political games are a massive waste of time when we don’t have time to waste. You deserve more than to have your United States Congress spend days and weeks grappling with the majority’s political witch hunts and games when we should be working long and hard towards passing a viable national budget and creating jobs for our people.

Despite the difficulties of trying to work with a Republican majority that prioritizes political points over progress, I am determined to stay focused on job creation and wise spending – as well as spending cuts – to move us forward.

With every good wish,

Sincerely yours,

John Dingell