The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
Back in 2012 through 2013 the GOP forced multiple federal shutdowns. Each one forced federal funding agencies to stop reviewing and handling research grants. Each time it derailed and delayed both my personal grants and our research group’s work. This directly contributed to making it much more difficult for me (a recent grad) to get a faculty appointment that I’d been working towards during 13 years of college.
The GOP’s talking points of how bad government is has direct and personal effects on people. Every time the government shuts down talking heads blather on how “See? Everything just keeps working even without the government! Obviously, we don’t need it.” They’re wrong. The effects pile on as our nation’s infrastructure grinds to a halt. People lose work, systems break down, and families are damaged by their selfish theft of our money (which is the whole point in the end).
I don’t vote GOP. They don’t care about me or my family. They’ve made that abundantly clear for decades now with no signs of changing. The sooner they’re destroyed as a party, the better.
Meanwhile, my brother working for the government loved those shutdowns. They had time off since they were not allowed to work, didn’t have to worry about keeping their job, and were guaranteed to eventually get paid for it. As long as you had the savings to tide yourself over, it could be a great gig.
Thanks to Republican trying to add “efficiency” by not letting people work but paying them for doing nothing