The Republican Budget: Because F*ck You

Washington, DC. With the wind at their backs, the Republican-controlled 114th Congress is wasting no time in proving that the previous Congress, renowned for its historic obstruction, record number of filibusters, minimal legislation, extraordinary disrespect for the president and an utter lack of feck, was not an aberration.

Two months into their majority, two Republican congressmen (Grimm and Schock) have resigned in disgrace, three of their presidential hopefuls (Christie, Perry and Walker) are facing possible criminal charges, they've held funding for HSA hostage over immigration, held up confirmation for AG nominee Loretta Lynch in the hopes that they could insert anti-choice language into a human trafficking bill, invited a foreign head of state (in sneering contempt of protocol) to address the august body and undermine the President amid delicate nuclear arms talks and became traitorous, lovesick correspondents with the Ayatollah Khamenei, who rebuffed their schoolboy advances.

Legislatively, they've pushed the Keystone XL Pipeline, tried to repeal Obamacare for the 59th time and reluctantly pulled their own anti-abortion bill when Republican women legislators deemed it too medieval, even for them.

One would imagine they would need to catch their breath. But no.

To absolutely no one's surprise, House Republicans dropped trou, squatted down on the Capitol steps and dumped their budget plan. The 10-year blueprint for how to totally destroy every positive step made by the present administration is basically the same one Representative Paul Ryan has peddled four times previously, the one ridiculed by every major economist and denounced by nuns for being too much like something Satan might come up with.

I won't bore you with too many details, because you can close your eyes and imagine it right now, especially if you're a fan of The Walking Dead, but in a nutshell, it cuts spending by 5.5 trillion dollars over its ten years, in a sort of political/economic version of the Black Death.  Of course you know who will feel those spending cuts: the poor and the middle class.

And of course it cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations who never pay taxes anyway, because fuck you.

And it cuts Medicaid funding by 913 billion dollars over ten years and relegates the program to the states in the form of block grants, because fuck you.

And it cuts billions from SNAP, known as Food Stamps, because fuck you.

And of course it repeals Obamacare, and with the Medicaid cuts, would knock an estimated 37 million Americans off the rolls of the insured, because fuck you.

But don't worry. It increases military spending, because fuck you.

Of course this budget will be widely touted by all Republicans, young and old, male and female, far right and farther right, on the Sunday morning shows, the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and that place where truth goes to die, Fox News. Most of the media will tell us that this proposed budget is courageous and unavoidable, like all of our glorious wars, because fuck you.

There is, however, a way to prevent this budget from ever becoming reality. It's called voting. Yes, there's an alternative to that: bloody revolution, which I readily admit would be cathartic and possibly thrilling in a horrible sort of way, but at my age, I'll opt for voting. Because, Republicans, fuck you.

©2015 Kona Lowell