A Clear Majority Of Democrats Abandon Pelosi's And Hoyer's Job-Destroying Sellout To Boehner

One of Pelosi's finest moments was when she stood up to her boss, House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, in October 2002, and told him to take the Iraq War Authorization bill he and DeLay had put together and stuff it where the sun don't shine. Although-- with help from House leaders Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel-- Gephardt managed to get 81 crucial Democrats in the House to OK Bush's plot to invade Iraq, most Democrats backed Pelosi and that was the end of Dick Gephardt's dreams of being Speaker or president. He's a creepy-crawly, sleazy Beltway lobbyist now. And Pelosi went on to be the first woman Speaker of the House f Representatives in history.

She's eager to retire now-- at least according to her daughter-- and she's... well, slipping. She's been backing Obama's crackpot scheme to go along with Republican plans to torture seniors by mercilessly slashing Social Security. And this week she voted for Boehner's Continuing Resolution. It passed-- with only with a minority of Democratic votes-- 81 + Pelosi. 115 Democrats voted no. The House caucus leader who did on Thursday what Pelosi had courageously done in 2002 was Los Angeles' fighting progressive Xavier Becerra, the emerging antidote to corrupt conservatives like Hoyer, Wasserman Schultz, and Israel.

Most of the progressives in the House voted against Boehner's bill and they were joined by 27 Republicans-- a few mainstream conservatives and libertarians like Walter Jones, Jimmy Duncan and Justin Amash, but mostly crackpot extremists and nihilists like Michelle Bachmann (MN), Paul Broun (GA), Ron DeSantis (FL), date rape doctor Scott DesJarlais (TN), Louie Gohmert (TX), Phil Gingrey (GA), Matt Salmon (AZ), Lynn Westmoreland (GA), Steve Stockman (TX)... the Todd Akin/Richard Mourlock wing of the House Republicans.

Raúl Grijalva-- rather than Pelosi-- spoke for a clear majority of Democrats when he refused to back the plan, which is likely to cost over a million jobs and fits in with the Republican Party Austerity Agenda that Obama seems to have embraced lately. “I won’t be told to vote for a bill that slashes everything in sight in the name of getting the budget process over with,” Grijalva said. “What House Republicans are doing to this country borders on criminal. This might be the first time we’ve seen a political party simultaneously take hostages and refuse to negotiate. The Congressional Progressive Caucus Back to Work Budget, which reduces unemployment to near five percent and reduces the national deficit by more than four trillion dollars in the next decade, is the way out of this mess. Austerity is going to be seen as the short-sighted ideological failure that it is, and we should stop this now before anyone else gets needlessly put out of work.” Grijalva listed the following as some of the reasons he and most Democrats turned their backs on Pelosi and Hoyer and Obama today and told them to go betray the American working family with the Republicans and leave good Democrats out of it.

•          Funding levels in the CR will impede the implementation of the Affordable Care Act as states and the Department of Health and Human Services establish health insurance exchanges. With a few exceptions, the CR reduces funding for every program in the Labor, Health and Education section below today’s funding levels.

•          The CR cuts Head Start by $400 million, resulting in 70,000 children losing access to comprehensive early learning and development services.

•          The CR cuts $730 million from Title I programs for education of the disadvantaged-- the equivalent of cutting instructional services for more than 2,500 schools serving more than 1 million disadvantaged children.

•          The CR cuts $282 million from job training programs, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unemployed adults, dislocated workers, veterans, young adults, and students losing access to employment services.

•          The CR cuts more than $1.5 billion in National Institutes of Health grant funding, which will slow the pace of important scientific research, result in fewer research awards, and threaten the jobs of researchers across the country.

•          The CR cuts more than $580 million in special education grant funding, which is the rough equivalent of shifting the cost of educating nearly 300,000 students with special needs to states and local education agencies.

•          The CR cuts $115 million from child care programs, which will cause roughly 30,000 children to lose access to child care.

•          The CR forces yet another pay freeze on all federal employees, which is widely expected to prevent the recruitment and retention of a qualified and committed federal workforce.