Tea party Republicans disregard middle class

by Bob Etheridge, former Congressman, published in Fayetteville Observer, September 22, 103.

The United States is within two weeks of facing government shutdown, six weeks of hitting the debt ceiling, and four months of repeating the thoughtless budget-cutting process known as sequestration. We're here because there are some people in Washington absolutely unwilling to make the compromises needed to govern. The result: We now face a moral crisis on top of the budgetary one.

Tea party Republicans came to Washington in 2011 and immediately took the government hostage. Conventional wisdom is that they wanted to cut government spending, but we know from the past 30 years that Republican administrations have spent eagerly on our national credit card, leaving Bill Clinton to redirect us to surplus and Barack Obama to pick up the economic pieces. House Republicans' real goal is to challenge the public compact with the working middle class by starving it of funds.

They've chosen several ways to do this. In April of 2011, they took the government to within hours of shutdown by refusing to approve an annual budget. Then, in July, they forced us to the brink of default, risking the world's trust in the promises we made to pay our bills, and relenting only when this sequestration procedure was created to reduce all of the federal departments by formula.

Now House Republicans want to do it again. There should be no illusion that this is a moral crisis, not just a budgetary one.

Sequestration cuts our military with no consideration of strategy, and it does the same for all of the federal government's other departments. The Education Department is one, and its responsibilities range from investing in at-risk rural school districts to underwriting college loans. Another is the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes everything from meat inspectors at the FDA to pandemic surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress groups these agencies' budgets together, along with the Labor Department, and sequestration cut them by more than $7 billion. Still, that wasn't enough. House Republicans' plan for next year would cut another $27 billion, so this section of our budget would be nearly a quarter smaller than it was planned to be this year.

That's a moral statement. Children don't learn in schools without supplies, and sick people can't work. It's possible - indeed, essential - to think critically about each dollar the government spends, but sequestration does the opposite. It slices every activity by thoughtless formula, teachers the same as technocrats, medicine the same as management overhead, and that's what makes this dispute about our values. Tea party Republicans are starving public programs designed for our working middle class.

None of the House Republicans reject our working middle class per se, but they neglect the realities of that life. It's a life where health care can be hard to get, and where retirement seems to keep moving further away. Government can provide the infrastructure for basic medicine and a safety net for retirees, but those are the programs tea party Republicans are really out to get. Compromise is anathema, and they don't intend to release their hostages until these services are chopped as ransom.

The Affordable Care Act, dubbed "Obamacare," is one of their fixations. House Republicans have voted 40 times to repeal this law. Guaranteeing health insurance for working middle-class Americans is important, and the repeal effort is a demonstrated loser, but now these Congress members are trying to force a 41st vote under threat of government shutdown.

Let's call that effort what it is. Tea party Republicans in the House want to stymie the only health insurance option many Americans have, and, if they don't get their way, they'll vote to send our meat inspectors, air traffic controllers, construction engineers and defense civilians home without pay.

Their other fixation is our retiree safety net, especially Medicare. Two hundred twenty-one House Republicans voted in March for a budget plan that would save money by requiring middle-class seniors to choose between getting lower-quality care or paying more for the same care. Some might even find themselves paying more to receive less.

Access to health care is a moral statement. These tea party Republicans also think they're standing on principle, but they don't understand or don't care that many others are committed to our public compact with the working and retired middle class. The only way past this dispute is compromise, but too many tea party Republicans would rather break the government than accept tradeoffs.

Voters send their representatives and senators to Washington to govern. That means compromise, and it means choosing our budget rather than leaving it to a calculator. Budgets are a reflection of our values, and those values require us to do better this time than we did last time.