Republicans Speeding Off a Cliff?

by Bob Henderson
Chair, Kay County , OK, Democrats

In the 1950s film “Rebel Without a Cause,” two teen-age drivers play a game of chicken. They drive speeding cars toward a cliff, and the driver who jumps out first is chicken. The plan is for both cars to hurl over the cliff, but for neither driver to get killed.

That’s the situation America is in right now. We’re speeding toward a debt ceiling cliff. President Obama (James Dean) has opened the door to compromise, but so far Republicans have not even cracked their door. Are they really willing to drive off that cliff?

They may be. That’s because most GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a pledge never to raise taxes UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

In the film, the second driver catches his jacket on the door and unwittingly plunges to his death. Republicans are trapped in their car by pledges to a man named Grover Norquist and something called the “Club for Growth.”

Norquist has promised to find and support a more conservative primary candidate to run against any Republican member of Congress who violates this pledge.

Alan Simpson, the Republican former senator from Wyoming , says, “If Grover Norquist has more power than the President, God help us.”

There is more than one way, as they say, to skin a cat, and more than one way to bring our national deficit and debt under control.

We can gut programs Democrats since FDR have constructed to lift working Americans out of poverty and help them join the middle class. These include, but are not limited to, Social Security and Medicare. Most immediately, it includes Medicaid, which provides healthcare for our poorest families and assists seniors who need to move into nursing homes, and cannot afford it on their own.

But it also includes the safety net for millions of unemployed Americans.

It also includes educating the next generation of Americans to compete in the 21^st century. It includes gutting Pell Grants for college, and making further cuts to our failing public schools. Already, thanks to the mania of Republicans in state governments for continuous tax cuts, several Western states will be able keep schools open only four days a week next year.

Here in Oklahoma , schools, thankfully, will remain open five days a week. But they have just absorbed most of the cuts needed to balance our state’s budget. And this is their third consecutive year of deep cuts.

How did we get here? The richest nation in the world unable to educate its children. The answer is simple. We got here by more than 30 years of Republicans campaigning against government. The single biggest cause of our ballooning national debt is the Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans.

Now Republicans are refusing to consider any revenue increases to help solve this problem they helped create — not even such insignificant actions as closing tax loopholes for corporate jets, unless they are offset by matching spending cuts.

I believe Republicans are speeding toward their greatest act of political suicide since the Great Depression, and they are determined to take working and middle-class Americans down with them.

President Obama is urging Democrats toward entitlement cuts that his party in Congress may not accept. So far, Republicans have absolutely refused any and all compromises. Their party line is that we must not weaken job providers, and any tax increase, even closing loopholes that allow billionaires to pay only 16 percent in federal taxes, will hurt that effort.

This sounds particularly disingenuous when they have not offered a single jobs bill since regaining control of the House of Representatives and, in fact, oppose payroll tax cuts that would benefit both small businesses and middle class families.

Whom do you think voters are going to blame if America goes over this cliff?