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.

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash

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, “the most significant expansion of benefits and services for toxic exposed veterans in more than 30 years,” ultimately had enough bipartisan support to pass without those 41 senators’ 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 376–49.

But 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.

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 McCarthy’s maniacal jeremiad against federal spending.

This is not a question of “fiscal responsibility,” as republicans love to claim they practice when appearing in public.

It’s part of a decades-old GOP strategy called “starving the beast", a political strategy former president Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman coined.

Basically, the goal is to eliminate government spending (the “beast”) 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 “the problem.”

Since it’s been around since Reagan, it’s 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 Speaker’s gavel again, they are showing no mercy — not 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, “Well, we told you you couldn’t trust the government. The VA is a failure.”

As VA Secretary Denis McDonough explained the proposed republican cuts would result in “a potential reduction of 30 million healthcare visit for veterans and the loss of over 81,000 VA employees providing benefits to veterans.”

The congressional Democrats who authored the piece challenge their republican colleagues to “put their money where their mouth is, and demonstrate their commitment to America’s veterans by producing a budget that honors those who served, lest they allow veterans’ healthcare and benefits to be held hostage by the extreme wing of their party.”

They add:

Veterans’ 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 nation’s veterans to honorably recognize their service — not subject them to political hijinks with potentially disastrous consequences.

Republicans work for one constituent — the wealthy.

That’s it.

They know, however, they can’t win by admitting their fealty to the economic royalists, so they have to suck up to their base’s racists, xenophobes, and misogynists with wedge issues and faux outrage.

Wrapping oneself in the flag is a tactic fascists use to create the illusion they’re “looking out for the country” while promoting policies that do the exact opposite.