Now Boehner and his wealthy lobbyist friends have launched a campaign to help him become Speaker of the House. While that idea might sound appealing to some people, I find it nauseating. Boehner, who has made it his goal to vote against legislation to help the average American, has sold his soul to the pro-business, anti-regulation, far right political machine.
Here is what Vice President Biden had to say about Boehner's economic plans.
ABC News:
“Mr. Boehner is nostalgic for those good old days, but the American people are not, they don’t want to go back, they want to move forward, and so folks, I’m still waiting for what it is that they are for,” Biden said. “[Republicans] think that the policies that they had in place during the eight years of the Bush administration, the ones that Mr. Boehner and his party helped craft themselves were the right ones.”
....Biden said that despite the high anticipation surrounding the announcement of the GOP’s economic agenda, the plan that Boehner laid out this morning does not declare specific policies that Republicans favor, but rather spells out the party’s opposition to economic policies Democrats have enacted and is merely a list of economic items Republicans believe President Obama should not do.
“After months of promising a look at his party’s agenda for their plans for America -- their economic agenda … his chief proposal when you look at it, apparently was that the president should fire his economic team. Very constructive advice and we thank the leader for that,” Biden quipped.....
Do you know what kind of legislation Boehner would propose if the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives? There would be cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, job training, funding for education, cuts to programs for the unemployed, and the poor. Right now, the Republican Party and Boehner seem to have little interest in the future of the the elderly, the poor and unemployed. Boehner's goal is to get those tax cuts for the rich, no matter what happens to anyone else.
The White House Blog had a timely response (even before Boehner's speech in Cleveland):
...While the rhetoric today may be new, the ideas remain the same: out-of-control deficits, decreased oversight of the big Wall Street banks that helped create the financial crisis and putting special interests first by maintaining tax loopholes for corporations that ship American jobs overseas. Ohioans are also likely to hear a case for extending the Bush high income tax cuts, which provide an average of $100,000 to households making more than $1 million per year while providing nothing for the middle class. This tired approach to cutting taxes for the richest is the poorest way to support our economy, according to the independent CBO (PDF), and it adds more than $700 billion to our deficits. At the same time, Rep. Boehner has repeatedly voted against efforts to cut taxes and extend credit to America's small businesses - putting partisanship above what our economy and our small business owners really need.
And American families haven’t forgotten that after years of economic policies that lined the pockets of the special interests while leaving middle class families out in the cold, it was Rep. Boehner who said earlier this summer that the reform bill strengthening oversight on Wall Street was , “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” Americans who felt the impact of a financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly 8 million jobs and cost people their homes and their life savings considered it more than an “ant.”
Today, Ohioans will hear the Minority Leader’s support for the same old failed economic policies that steered our economy into the ditch that we’re just now beginning to climb out of. We cannot afford a return to the past. These failed economic policies haven’t changed, and they won’t bring the change American families need....
Exactly! If you really want and believe in progress, you cannot support Boehner, his hand-picked Republican candidates, like Steve Stivers, or any of the far right GOPers and their Tea Party clones. Boehner and Company want to return to the old days when lobbyists were kings, and Enron, Tyco, and Lehman Brothers wrote the books on how to conduct business.
Here is a bumper sticker that sums up the battle against Boehner, McConnell, and the regulation-hating, old white men of the Republican Party:
The Liberal Store:
