Behind The Smoke and Mirrors, Republicans Have No Plan To Extend Unemployment Benefits

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Today the Senate is set to vote on the Democrats’ unemployment benefit extension, which means that Republicans will be finding new ways to avoid voting yes on something that used to be bipartisan (Republicans voted five times to extend unemployment under Bush), while trying to stick within their talking points of not alienating the vulnerable out loud.

Republicans claim they are going to offer a conservative policy to fight the war on poverty. They don’t have one right now, except to say NO to anything that the Democrats offer, including paid for extensions of unemployment benefits.

This is becoming rather predictable from Republicans. After all, for years they’ve been claiming they were going to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, but then it turned out that they had no replace plan. They ran on “replace” but they had no replace.

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This should have been big news, but apparently the media doesn’t find policy very interesting. It’s all a he said/she said scenario, and the loudest whinger wins. So don’t expect them to tell you what’s behind door number 2, the GOP’s War on Poverty. Republicans will think about actual policy tomorrow. All they know is they are against any actual solutions presented to them, and they must keep moving the goal post without admitting that they just can’t offer any help to the unemployed because it might help Obama.

Yes, like Scarlet O’Hara, Republicans will think about policy tomorrow. Only tomorrow never comes.

“Tomorrow” they will think about a policy to help the poor that their far right party will allow. This policy can’t include any kind of social safety net like food stamps or welfare or unemployment or affordable health insurance because all of these things are the work of the Socialist Devil himself, according to the GOP base. And this is an election year. They mustn’t do anything to rouse the rabid beast.

The GOP War on Poverty is also just like the Republican job plan. Their alleged jobs plan is Keystone XL, which is just another plan to provide welfare to oil companies, passed off as a jobs bill. Keystone might help a few people temporarily — it will not create more than 2,500 temporary jobs for two-years — but this doesn’t make it a failure since it was designed to help the oil companies, not the poor/jobless/vulnerable. Additional Republican “jobs plans” include overhauling the No Child Left Behind education law and repealing the Affordable Care Act, both of which will help corporations. It will trickle down, Republicans say.

Someday it will trickle down. Sure, millions have died waiting, but one fine day, it will finally trickle down. Have faith.

As we await the vote on unemployment today, the question the alert are asking is: If Republicans vote no on unemployment benefits, what is their plan?

Republicans said they couldn’t support unemployment benefits because they weren’t paid for, and then Reid came up with a way to pay for them and now Republicans are busy moving the shell around, ducking and dodging from the fact that they have no plan. According to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Republicans are opposing the Democratic proposal because the extension is too long, “We’re very much opposed to that length of extension. There’s room for compromise but a year is just too long.”

Once again, the party of no has no plan.

The Republican Party can’t legislate. They are too dysfunctional to legislate, assuming that legislating was their goal. But even though they are being paid to legislate, passing actual working legislation is not the goal of Republicans.

Republicans have admitted their goal, and it hasn’t changed. The goal is to obstruct everything Obama does and to hold the economy hostage until they get back into power, so they can hand unregulated goodies back to the top 2%.

So there is no Republican plan for the War on Poverty, except to keep finding less insulting ways to blame the poor, while offering lame excuses for their failure to act until they can get the reins back into the hands of the very people who caused this economic collapse.



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