Someone needs to learn the ‘culture of work’
President Obama pointed out last week that the 113th Congress will be the least productive in recorded history.
MaddowBlog‘s Steve Benen made this chart to show just how true this claim was:
However, it’s worth pointing out that while this House of Representatives will go down in history for accomplishing less than any House since at least 1947, it has done a few things that deserve recognition.
In no particular order, here’s what the House GOP has done:
- It reduced the number of days it is scheduled to work from 126 in 2013 to 113 in 2014.
- It helped Senator Ted Cruz shut down the federal government for 16 days, costing the economy $24 billion, as the House GOP demanded, among other things, that the president roll back Obamacare’s birth control mandate.
- It passed the Ryan Budget which cuts Medicare benefits for all beneficiaries then cuts Medicare benefits for all Americans under 55 in four more ways; the budget, which cuts taxes on millionaires, also cuts $3.3 trillion from programs that help the poor over ten years with zero cuts to defense spending.
- After letting Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits be cut for every family in the program, it cut $8.5 billion more in food stamps from the budget, which Democrats in the Senate and states are trying to partially restore using a loophole.
- It has let emergency unemployment insurance expire for up to 2 million Americans, after Republicans extended emergency benefits five times under George W. Bush.
- It refused to consider a Senate plan to restore emergency unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed seeking work.
- It refused to even consider the Senate immigration reform bill passed with Republican support.
- However, it did vote to deport undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children — twice.
- It voted 20 times — including the latest Ryan Budget — to change Obamacare without having any plan as to what would happen to the 14.1 – 26.1 million Americans who now have coverage thanks to the law.
- After months of delay, it passed the Violence Against Women Act with only 87 of the majority supporting the law.
- It passed Sandy relief three months after the storm hit and only after Republicans from the Mid-Atlantic region blasted the delay.
- It renamed 10 post offices.
So while it accomplished almost nothing, the Republican Congress has made clear that it would like the federal government to do a lot less to help the working people, the uninsured, the undocumented and the unemployed while doing more to help the richest.
What explains this kind of behavior?
We have got this tailspin of culture, in House Republicans in particular, of men not working and just not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.
So there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.
