Artist rendering of proposed GOP sign on the new federal building in San Francisco
Like typical politicians, the tea party Republicans have not even bothered to deliver on their campaign promises. They have done nothing to create jobs — they haven't even held a hearing on employment. And their approach to reducing the deficit is to cut programs that help the middle class, sick and elderly or that are counter to their right-wing ideology, while adamantly refusing even to discuss raising taxes on the 400 American families that control $1.27 trillion — that's $3.175 billion per family — of the nation's wealth.
Instead of addressing jobs or the economy, the tea party House has resorted to the same sort of ideological gimmickry that was the hallmark of the Bush and Gingrich eras. Since they took control of the House in January, the tea party has:
- Botched their own swearing-in ceremony
- Read the Constitution out loud, leaving out the icky parts about slavery and accidentally skipping entire sections, requiring a hasty do-over
- Wasted time voting to defund health-care reform without bothering to mention the "replacement" law they promised in their "Repeal and replace" campaign slogan
- Despite repeatedly claiming, "We're broke, we're broke," rammed through a $20 million subsidy for private religious schools in D.C.
- Wasted yet more of the taxpayers' time passing a budget that the president would never sign, in part, because it would have killed 700,000 and 1 million jobs and arbitrarily cut $61 billion from programs without regard to their effectiveness — ordering, for example, draconian cuts to the Poison Control Centers, Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, tsunami warning systems, job training programs and even the IRS, the primary government bureau that brings in revenue
- After drastically reducing IRS funding, debated putting the IRS in charge of investigating abortions — a measure that has 221 co-sponsors
- Defunded NPR because of yet another deceptively edited "punk'd" video by federal felon James O'Keefe
- Killed the U.S. Capitol's composting program
And now comes this theocratic silliness:
[Virginia] U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes' bill to reaffirm "In God We Trust" as the national motto and encourage its display in all public schools was approved by a House committee Thursday after a sharp partisan debate.
Opponents argued it goes too far in pushing one religious belief, while supporters said it acknowledges what they consider God's role in the success of the United States.
The legislation, approved in a voice vote by the Judiciary Committee, is similar to a bill that Forbes, a Chesapeake Republican, unsuccessfully proposed in the previous session when the House had a Democratic majority. The current measure was sent to the full House, now controlled by Republicans. It has 64 co-sponsors – 60 Republicans and four Democrats.
A little background: The Founding Fathers chose as the motto for the United States, "E pluribus unum," which means "Out of many, one." In 1956, at the height of the Cold War, as an insult directed at the godless communists who ran the Soviet Union, Congress passed a law making "In God we trust" the motto. Founders Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington as well as Abraham Lincoln, all of whom believed firmly in the separation of religion and the state and none of whom were particularly religious, have been spinning in their graves ever since.
Similarly, this new bill from Rep. Forbes is really just a political goad directed at Pres. Obama, who recently cited "E pluribus unum" as the national motto.
There are apparently about 9,000 federal buildings around the country, so as far as "jobs, jobs, jobs," goes, if it requires two signmakers to create and install a new sign for each building, that's 18,000 temporary jobs, or, at the very least, work orders.
Way to create jobs, GOP! Hey, wait a minute. Isn't it GOP dogma that government can't create jobs?
But in terms of cutting spending this is bill is a loser. The law doesn't lay out the specifications for the materials to be used to make the signs, but nothing is too good for God, right? We can't have cheap-ass plastic signs praising God on our federal buildings. At the very least, the signs should be engraved in marble or cast in brass.
There won't be definitive figures on the cost of these 9,000 fancy new signs until the Congressional Budget Office does an analysis, but let's say that the average cost to create and install a sign is $10,000.
That puts the cost to taxpayers for creating 9,000 new signs at $90 million.
What happened to "We're broke?"
Let's hope the independent voters who sent the tea party to Washington are paying attention to this nonsense — the claims that the United States is bankrupt and yet billionaires can't be taxed to help close the gap; the failed promises on jobs; the reckless budget cuts; the hours and hours wasted passing bills that are nothing more than political sop to the right-wing fringe, now including a bill to post "In God We Trust" on 9,000 government-owned buildings.
Is this really what you wanted, swing voters?
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