So How's Florida Healthcare Hypocrite Sandy Adams Been Doing In Congress So Far?

Monkey in the middle... Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right

You're not likely to find a more persistent, outspoken voice for the conservative consensus than the Orlando Sentinel's in any newsroom in America. And in central Florida they are the echo chamber for the country's ruling elite. So, no matter what it might mean to you, their headline yesterday, Freshman Rep. Sandy Adams Is A Vocal Conservative In Congress, was anything but pejorative. They have their own Inside-the-Betway reporting, Mark Matthews, covering the local delegation, insurance that it will always be written with the appropriate Beltway spin rather than anything that could possibly be organic to the 24th congressional district.

Although Adams is, if anything, a fifth rate backbencher with zero influence, Matthews builds her up a little bit for the local rubes: "In just four months, rookie U.S. Rep. Sandy Adams of Orlando has made clear she intends to be more than a quiet foot soldier in the Republican revolution of last year. Since joining Congress, the former Orange County deputy sheriff and eight-year state legislator has grown into a full-throttle supporter of every major GOP initiative, even picketing outside the Democratic-controlled Senate when Congress was on the verge of a government shutdown."

True enough Adams has already cemented her reputation as a mindless rubber stamp zombie for the deranged right-wing, Koch-financed counter-revolution. Like Webster and Mica, the areas' 2 other Republican congressmembers, she's determined to overturn the New Deal and shred the social contract that has made America work for the past 75 years.

She has co-sponsored legislation to neuter the new health-care law, fought efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and joined the crusade to slash the federal budget, positions consistent with the tea-party backers who helped her win a landslide victory over U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, D-New Smyrna Beach, last year.

"It's a drop in the ocean the reductions that we've made in this year's budget," said Adams, who voted against the budget deal that would fund the government through the remainder of 2011-- while slashing an estimated $38 billion-- because the cuts weren't deep enough. Last week, she voted for the budget plan by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that, among other things, would slice future funding for Medicare and Medicaid.

Not a hint in Matthews' reportage of how Paul Krugman describes the extremist budget-- "a cause," according to it's author Paul Ryan-- a budget that will upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in central Florida, almost all of them for the worse, and which was voted for with gusto by Ms. Adams.

Consider the Ryan budget proposal, which all the Very Serious People assured us was courageous and important. That proposal begins by warning that “a major debt crisis is inevitable” unless we confront the deficit. It then calls, not for tax increases, but for tax cuts, with taxes on the wealthy falling to their lowest level since 1931.

And because of those large tax cuts, the only way the Ryan proposal can even claim to reduce the deficit is through savage cuts in spending, mainly falling on the poor and vulnerable. (A realistic assessment suggests that the proposal would actually increase the deficit.)

...Wait, there’s more. The core of the Ryan proposal is a plan to privatize and defund Medicare. Yet this would do nothing to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years, which is why all the near-term deficit reduction comes from brutal reductions in aid to the needy and unspecified cuts in discretionary spending. Tax increases, by contrast, can be fast-acting remedies for red ink.

And that’s why the only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget is the one that includes significant tax increases: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which — unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking — is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice.

Adams voted against the People's Budget... instead she wants to do away entirely with progressive taxation, which taxes the wealthy at a higher rate than the middle class, and replace it with a national sales tax which puts the burden even more fully than it already is, on working people.

Matthews may have seen our Sandy Adams coverage, since he referred to "One left-leaning blogger" who "labeled Adams a 'healthcare hypocrite' for rejecting her congressional health plan, even though she is still covered by a government policy through her husband, John, an Orange County circuit judge." He didn't mention the radio ads we ran all over the sprawling district. Give it a listen:



It's part of the reason Blue America's first endorsed candidate of the 2012 cycle was her progressive Democratic opponent, Nicholas Ruiz. Matthews, true to Orlando Sentinel tradition, doesn't mention Ruiz in his puff piece on Adams, let alone ask him to rebut her nonsense. He writes that Adams defended the hypocritical healthcare "arrangement as 'just a personal decision' and said it's not hypocritical because she never intended it as a protest against the health-care plan that passed Congress last year." So we reached out to Nicholas for them and asked him how he feels about the congressmember representing his district. He interpreted Matthews' article far more positively than I did:

I'd say the Orlando Sentinel is spot-on. Adams' sponsorship of lame legislation and her voting record make it clear to Florida and America: she doesn't care about the environment, she does not want to invest in America, she doesn't believe in comprehensive universal healthcare as a basic human right. Sandy Adams is a real tea party dream.

Adams is an order taker for the radical right, along with Marco Rubio (R-FL), Daniel Webster (FL-8), Bill Posey (FL-15), Allen West (FL-20) and all the other 'all night' tea partiers. It's a way of life for them. Like Bernie Sanders, and others have pointed out-- for these kinds of representatives, it's the politics of Robin Hood in reverse: starve the poor to feed the rich."

Nicholas is running an entirely grassroots campaign. He isn't taking money from the kinds of special interest corporate PACs that have been financing Adams. If you can help out, every small donation helps him to get his message out. You can contribute here. Every contribution that comes in today with an additional .01 (one penny) gets an autographed CD by Middle States (Happy Fun Party) as a little happy fun thank you from DWT.