It is with chagrin that I must report that my new congressional representative has joined the cabal of right-wing fiscal hostage-takers in suggesting that we must cut spending before increasing the nation’s debt ceiling.
Keith Self, a McKinney Republican, wrote a letter to the editor of the Dallas Morning News in which he declared that unrestricted federal spending poses an existential threat to our nation’s economic health. Therefore, he implied, he won’t approve measures to increase the debt ceiling until we curb spending … and thus will put the nation’s “full faith and credit” in dire peril.
Self’s Third Congressional District constituents might have to watch their retirement accounts vanish if Self’s world view becomes policy in the House of Representatives.
Increasing the national debt has been a perfunctory act since the beginning of the republic. Only now, with the GOP’s narrow House majority being led by the MAGA cultists who comprise a loudmouthed minority of Republicans in the House, it has become an “issue” worth debating.
This is crap! Reneging on our national fiscal obligations would plunge the nation into economic “calamity,” according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Why do Republicans in Congress insist on threatening to do such a horrendous thing? What the hell kind of statement are they trying to make?
Furthermore, why are GOP members taking this posture only when we have a Democrat sitting in the White House? Where in the hell was the Republican insistence on spending cuts when one of their own — Joe Biden’s immediate predecessor — sat in the Oval Office?
These congressional clowns are showboating and grandstanding — and holding our life’s savings, yours and mine — hostage to their preening and prancing.
And the man who represents me in Congress is one of ’em.
Despicable.