Republicans at work

GOP: “We don’t have money” for sick kids because we gave it all to the wealthy

At the beginning of the holiday season, Republicans showed Americans where their priorities lie: Giving aid and comfort to mega-rich donors and leaving sick children out in the cold.

Republicans, who control the House, Senate, and the White House, have refused to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). 

This program, which provides health care to nine million low-income children and pregnant women, expired on September 30th.

Instead, with the holidays fast approaching, Republicans focused on their top priority: raising taxes on the poor and middle class to give billions to the top one percent.

In the middle of a cold December night, Republicans rammed through a tax scam bill riddled with mark-ups written all over it that were literally illegible.

But when asked about reauthorizing CHIP just days before, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch had the gall to claim, “We don’t have the money” to pay for it.

A Historic Tax Heist

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. 

The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. 

Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

How every senator voted.

Bob Corker was the only Republican to vote No.

Do you still think "Republican moderate" is not an oxymoron?

All the Democrats voted No.

Trump Is Vandalizing Our Wild Heritage

The president is expected to travel to Utah on Monday to announce that he is repealing protections for as many as two million acres of public land in the American West, an area more than six times the size of Grand Teton National Park, including vast portions of two national monuments in the state, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Mr. Trump’s plans add up to the largest elimination of protected areas in American history. 

He is a vandal in our midst, coming in person to lay waste to the land. 

This theft of our heritage should awaken us to the damage being piled up across our public lands under this administration.

If he succeeds, tens of thousands of Native American sacred sites in southern Utah will be at renewed risk of looting. 

Red rock canyon lands will face the prospect of being stripped for coal and drilled for oil and gas. 

And the wild places where we hike and hunt and find solitude may not be there for future generations to do the same.