Republicans are lying to you about the PACT Act

I spent (way) too much time on Twitter yesterday trying to get to the bottom of all the changes made to the PACT Act from the time the Senate first passed it 84-14, to voting it down two weeks later 55-42. 

What happened to cause this turnabout face by Republicans on a bill that helps our veterans who have been damaged by working around burn pits? What dark magic did the Democrats add to the bill to create this Republican exodus?

The answer? 

Nothing. 

Nothing was changed in the bill that affected "discretionary" vs "mandatory" spending, which is the claim we continue to hear from Republicans and their loyal following. 

"The Democrats made last minute changes", they tell us. 

"They changed the way the money is spent", they argue. 

"It's an accounting gimmick!", they exclaim.  

Except, none of that is true. It's the exact same bill they approved 84-14.

Let's take a look at the timeline of this bill: 

June 6th - the CBO released its score of the bill. Any "accounting gimmicks" that might have been in the bill were there for all to see.  

10 days pass... plenty of time to read the bill, no?

June 16th -  the Senate voted and passed the CBO-scored bill 84-14. (In today's political climate, that's a complete slam dunk)

Oh, but then something happened on the way to finally passing the bill once it came back from the House...

June 27th - Joe Manchin agreed to support the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), much to the Republicans' chagrin. They were certain they had his support to block this bill. I mean, he's Joe Manchin, right? When Manchin flipped on IRA, the Republicans flipped out.

June 29th - The Senate voted 55-42 to block the PACT Act. The same bill they JUST passed 84-14 two weeks before. A bill that was scored by the CBO, a bill they had 10 days to review before their first vote, a bill that was desperately needed to help our veterans who are dying. 

Literally. Dying.

And now, the Republicans are effectively gas lighting their followers into believing last minute changes and "gimmicks" were added to the PACT Act, that the Democrats have tried to "sneak something through". 

During my (fruitless) Twitter exchanges, I saw a lot of CLAIMS about what the Democrats did, but no EVIDENCE. 

"Pat Toomey said" they argued. 

Uh, yeah, Pat Toomey can SAY anything, but where is the evidence that changes were made to "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending between their 84-14 vote and the 55-42 vote two weeks later? 

Not one person came back with that very important bit of evidence. Why is that? Both versions of the bill are posted online. Anyone can look at them. Why are we not seeing the contradictory language in the two bills?

They can't provide evidence of these Democratic changes, because there aren't any. 

The Republicans are throwing a hissy fit because they got double-crossed by Manchin on the IRA, and are taking their revenge out on veterans dying from cancer. Because they think this lie about changes to the PACT Act will stick and Democrats will get blamed.

Politics over veterans.

While their obvious gas lighting may work with the core MAGA cultists, it doesn't work with the rest of us. We see through the Republican lies and see them for what they are: 

Petty, vindictive, power-hungry liars. That's their brand, and they reinforce it on a daily basis. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Loves The Little Children (wait, not you)

Image
Jesus loves the little children All the children of the world Red and Yellow, Black and White They are precious in his sight Jesus loves the little children of the world Singing this song is one of my earliest memories from growing up going to Sunday school. It taught me that all of us, no matter what we look like or where we come from, are loved by the God we were gathering to worship twice on Sundays and Wednesday nights.  This song taught me that I should accept those who might look differently than me (which, growing up in a small, whites only town in Indiana, was a rare occurrence, to be sure), because GOD loved them.  That was the point, wasn't it? That if God loved these people, then we should, too? This week we saw a story about the popular, and notoriously anti-LGBTQ, food chain Chick-fil-A and the reaction some on the right had when discovering Chick-fil-A's website included a section on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and that they had "just hired" a...
Read more

Impeach Trump: Now

Image
The Democrats should be moving full speed ahead on impeaching the president. This is the moment where, historically, Democrats have chosen to take the sensible, well-thought out, reactionary way forward, when what was needed was for them to grab ahold of the narrative and shape it to THEIR will. We don’t need to wait and contemplate while hoping the unredacted version of the Mueller Report gets released soon (we’ve seen enough already). What Trump does so well is to set the framing of the narrative. For instance, when he repeatedly made his racist birther claims about President Obama, Trump introduced a frame, a worldview, that included the possibility of Obama not being an American citizen. The narrative within that frame, whether for or against, necessarily included discussion of Obama’s citizenship, a topic we’d never addressed before in reference to a sitting president. It didn’t matter that his birtherism claims weren’t true, they became a part of the narrative, the disc...
Read more

McConnell's Misplaced Historical Precedent

“You have to go back to 1880 to find last time a Senate controlled by a different party from the president confirmed a Supreme Court justice to a vacancy created in the middle of a presidential election,” McConnell said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning, turning to historical precedent. This isn’t even an honest point (shocking!). It’s a complete Red Herring. A misdirection. The point isn’t that this particular situation hasn’t happened since 1880, the argument McConnell should be making is to point out ALL the times since 1880 where this exact situation actually presented itself , and then a nomination wasn’t even considered. Just like Merrick Garland wasn't even considered. That would be historical precedent.
Read more