Posts tagged: Republican Party
Republicans have been accusing Obama of waging war on the Catholic Church, if not on religion in general, because he won’t let the church have its way on issues like birth control.
However, the same politicians who are attacking Obama have voted against the Catholic Church in a number of other (even bigger) policy issues. Are they waging a war on the Catholic Church, or are they just being hypocritical for political gain?
Juan Cole in AlterNet has put together a list of Catholic teachings that conservatives ignore or reject, while at the same time obsessing about birth control:
- Pope John Paul II was against the war in Iraq.
- The Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the Bush use of preemptive war.
- The bishops require that health care be provided to all Americans.
- The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty for criminals.
- The Conference of Catholic Bishops wants the federal minimum wage to be increased.
- The same US bishops also want welfare for all needy families.
- They also say “the basic rights of workers must be respected — the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions…”
- The US bishops also demand the withdrawal of Israel from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
- They also condemn Arizona’s law on immigrants and suggest that it is a harbinger of American Nazism. They say that illegal immigrants should not be treated as criminals.
How do the Republican presidential candidates stand on these issues?
Shortly after gaining the House of Representatives in 2010 the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, made the welcome claim that the primary goal of the Republican Party was to increase employment. His exact words were:
“We’re going to have a relentless focus on creating jobs.”
The following, therefore, is a chronological list of legislative activities by the GOP beginning 2-10-2011. I’m sorry to report that none, so far, have resulted in a single new job being created in America.
Note: I began this list as sort of a joke. That it has reached its currently imposing length without one anecdotal citation of new employment is simply astonishing, though not surprising as the GOP’s plan is to keep the economy languishing and blame it all on Mr. Obama. The House, after all, enacts legislation and controls the governmental purse-strings, not the President.
Funny list of all the non-job-creating accomplishments of the House for the past year. ”Keeping millions unemployed to put one man [Obama] out of work”
I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a “genius,” but the answer turns out is simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing no-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his doctorate in history; he routinely claims he understands issues more deeply than anyone else; he has made a career of denouncing or (when he had the authority) eliminating professional expertise that might challenge his own certain pronouncements; and he is a veritable fount of crackpot “big” ideas
New York Representative Anthony Wiener congratulates the GOP Representatives for finally passing the ‘emergency’ bill to de-fund NPR — some excellent sarcasm on the floor of the House.
1) Republicans not only want to reduce women’s access to abortion care, they’re actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t.
2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain “victims.”
3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)
4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5) In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids’ preschool
program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9) Congress voted yesterday on a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic
health care and family planning in our country.
10) And if that wasn’t enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can’t make this stuff up).
Provided by MoveOn — citations available here.
Alas for all of us and for American conservatism in particular, the new Republican majority that took control of the House on Wednesday is embarked on an experiment in government by abstractions. Many in its ranks pride themselves on being practical business people, but they behave as professors in thrall to a few thrilling ideas.
Their rhetoric is nearly devoid of talk about solving practical problems - how to improve our health care, education and transportation systems, or how to create more middle-class jobs.
The House Republican Steering Committee voted on Tuesday to name all committee chairman for the incoming Congress. Their choice to head the House Financial Services Committee, the committee in charge of overseeing the financial sector and the government’s implementation of new financial reforms, happens to be the member of Congress most reliant on contributions from the financial sector.
Today [Dec. 1], all 42 Republican Senators signed a letter declaring emphatically that they will not let the Senate consider any legislation or take any action at all, until the tax cuts for the wealthy have been extended.
The Democrats want to extend the tax cuts for people earning less than $250,000 a year, but that isn’t good enough. The Republicans are saying that driving up the deficit by throwing money at the rich is more important than any other legislation. They claim that raising taxes for the rich will destroy jobs, even though since these tax cuts were put in place in 2003, job creation has been a dismal failure. And the gap between the rich and poor has been rising dramatically, while the deficit has been increasing (and the huge deficit does destroy jobs).
But giving tax cuts to the rich are not just the Republicans’ highest priority, but their ONLY priority.
It makes me sick.
And as Steve Benen points out “the unstated truth behind the threat — Republicans will block literally everything until they’re satisfied, at which point, they’ll try to block literally everything anyway.”
