Republicans Aren't Even Pretending to Care About Veterans Anymore
Now republicans hold the House majority, and if they weren't going to pretend to care about veterans and their families when they didn't, they aren't about to now that they do.

Almost a year ago, 41 senators voted to kill the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, a bipartisan bill designed to expand health care and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals and burn pits, in retaliation for Democrats passing the Inflation Reduction Act.
The PACT Act, āthe most significant expansion of benefits and services for toxic exposed veterans in more than 30 years,ā ultimately had enough bipartisan support to pass without those 41 senatorsā votes.
Then in October, 49 republican House members demonstrated their own disdain for veterans when they voted against the Food Security for All Veterans Act, a measure designed to establish an Office of Food Security at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
With Democrats holding a slim majority, the bill passed 376ā49.
But now republicans hold the House majority, and if they werenāt going to pretend to care about veterans and their families when they didnāt, they arenāt about to now that they do.
According to a recent piece Democratic Reps. Mark A. Takano, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Chris Deluzio wrote for Military Times, congressional republicans are threatening to slash $30 billion in veteran spending as part of Speaker Kevin McCarthyās maniacal jeremiad against federal spending.
This is not a question of āfiscal responsibility,ā as republicans love to claim they practice when appearing in public.
Itās part of a decades-old GOP strategy called āstarving the beast", a political strategy former president Ronald Reaganās budget director David Stockman coined.
Basically, the goal is to eliminate government spending (the ābeastā) by defunding vital government agencies so they collapse under their own weight. Republican lawmakers can then return to their constituents and report that, just as predicted, those agencies were a waste of their money.
This is not surprising coming from the president whose first inaugural speech called government āthe problem.ā
Since itās been around since Reagan, itās hardly new. But make no mistake, republicans have been hard at work at it for the past three and a half decades, and now that they hold the Speakerās gavel again, they are showing no mercyāāānot even to vets.
They know that once VA funding is cut and veterans who rely on the government for health care have to contend with increased claims backlogs, decreased hospital staff, less attention to national cemeteries, weakened cybersecurity, less attention to VA infrastructure, and longer wait times, republican politicians can say, āWell, we told you you couldnāt trust the government. The VA is a failure.ā
As VA Secretary Denis McDonough explained the proposed republican cuts would result in āa potential reduction of 30 million healthcare visit for veterans and the loss of over 81,000 VA employees providing benefits to veterans.ā
The congressional Democrats who authored the piece challenge their republican colleagues to āput their money where their mouth is, and demonstrate their commitment to Americaās veterans by producing a budget that honors those who served, lest they allow veteransā healthcare and benefits to be held hostage by the extreme wing of their party.ā
They add:
Veteransā care and benefits are sacred promises we pay to our veterans as part of the cost of war and in acknowledgment of their sacrifice. We owe it to our nationās veterans to honorably recognize their serviceāāānot subject them to political hijinks with potentially disastrous consequences.
Republicans work for one constituentāāāthe wealthy.
Thatās it.
They know, however, they canāt win by admitting their fealty to the economic royalists, so they have to suck up to their baseās racists, xenophobes, and misogynists with wedge issues and faux outrage.
Wrapping oneself in the flag is a tactic fascists use to create the illusion theyāre ālooking out for the countryā while promoting policies that do the exact opposite.