House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth.With everyone from President Obama to his Republican challengers in the 2012 campaign focusing on ways to spur economic growth, House Republicans will roll out plans Monday to fight regulations from the National Labor Relations Board, pollution rules handed down by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulations that affect health plans for small businesses. In addition, the lawmakers plan to urge a 20 percent tax deduction for small businesses.“It is essential that the House continue our focus on the jobs crisis,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote in a memo to be sent to GOP lawmakers Monday.
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The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”The result of these votes is likely to mirror failed efforts this year to repeal landmark legislation that was approved during Obama’s first two years in office — his health-care law and the Dodd-Frank consumer protection bill — but it will provide a framework for Republicans to highlight a jobs agenda. Also, leaders have pushed several of their freshman lawmakers to advance the anti-regulation bills, providing the newcomers with a chance to tout proposals that could resonate with voters in their districts.
I am seeing a formula here - pick a policy or boogieman completely unrelated to current economic conditions but that resonates with your failed ideology and mouth breathing base, relentlessly hammer at this policy in the House even though it has zero chance of ever passing the Senate and even less of a chance of making it past the President's veto pen, all the while taking to Fox News and the Sunday shows and spew lies, misinformation, and propaganda about how the Democrats are killing the nation with their support of the boogieman and how it's their fault that we're in the mess that we are, and oh if they would just compromise a little bit on this very reasonable and "pro-growth" GOP position, we would all be rolling in the Benjamins.
We saw it the last two years with the deficit as a political cudgel. The deficit has absolutely nothing to do with unemployment or flagging GDP - not a fucking thing. But that was the Republican meme. And the Democrats went along like the bunch of groupthink fraught morons that they are. But I have a feeling that the GOP has gone a bit far on this one and I don't think they will get very far with a "screw labor unions/pollute more" agenda for jobs. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that anything the President reveals in his speech next week will be much more palatable to the American public, but I could also be placing far too much faith in our incredibly stupid and uninformed electorate.
Finally, this latest stunt from the GOP circus is just further proof that they don't care fuck all for the country or the economy. Focusing on labor unions and environmental regulations at a time of 9.1% unemployment and GDP growth nearing recession is laughable and stupid. It's just an attempt to enact an extreme, ideological agenda under the cloak of jobs. After all, two pillars of the modern Republican party is gutting worker rights and polluting as much as possible because pollution creates jobs and climate change is a farce and only Jebus can harm or end this world. But they are Very Serious People because they hold elected office, and their buddies in the media will treat them as such with kid gloves. Expect this to get a similar treatment to Paul Ryan's 'courageous' abolition of Medicare. The media won't care that the GOP is a bunch of clowns and these policies are cynical and ideologically driven and will do nothing to improve the economy or create jobs. What matters is that they're trying! They're putting something on the table!
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