by Jesse Jackson

Ask Americans what they are concerned about most and -- in overwhelming numbers -- they'll reply: jobs and the economy.

Ask them what the highest priority of the Congress should be and -- in overwhelming numbers -- they'll reply: jobs and the economy.

So how is the new Republican majority in the House spending its time? Its notorious first debate was on repealing health care reform. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reports this would add more than $230 billion to deficits over the next 10 years, and more than a trillion over the long term. Republican leader John Boehner simply dismissed the CBO's estimates as irrelevant, and said Republicans would ignore it. But whatever the effect on the deficit, the symbolic debate didn't have anything to do with generating jobs.

Republicans' second priority received less publicity. They voted to strip 5 million people of democratic representation in the House of Representatives, creating rules that deprived representatives of residents of Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands of their vote on the House floor in the Committee of the Whole. House Republicans to people of color: Drop dead.

Consider the U.S. citizens living in the District of Columbia, who happen to be majority African-American. They pay more taxes (about $21 billion per year) to the federal government than 19 states. They have more voters than Wyoming. They serve in the military, sacrificing life and limb for their country. They elect a representative to Congress, but now she, Eleanor Holmes Norton, has no vote. Republicans talk a lot about the tea party spirit, but they just imposed taxation without representation on the residents of the nation's capital.

Imagine if the government of Afghanistan stripped residents of Kabul of the vote. Or if the head of Iraq decided Baghdad had too many Sunnis and should have no voting representation. Or imagine the condemnations that would be unleashed were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to decide the people of Caracas should have no voting representation.

Republicans seem intent on scoring ideological points, not on helping to get the economy moving. They dubbed health care reform the "job killing" health care bill to pretend that repeal had something to do with jobs. They didn't even resort to that pretense on stripping voting representation from D.C. and others.

Then the Republican Study Group announced it intended to enact cuts in domestic discretionary spending that would require wiping out 50 percent of programs like Head Start, the National Institutes of Health, cancer research, the FBI and Federal Drug Administration, student aid, renewable energy programs and more. But they didn't identify exactly what they would cut. Instead they boasted about eliminating National Public Radio, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, AmeriCorps, research funding on fuel efficiency and other supposedly liberal programs.

Are Republicans focused on what is needed to get the economy going? Hardly. Are they interested in budget deficits? Their votes on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich and repealing the savings built into health reform add literally hundreds of billions to projected deficits. And now the chair of their budget committee is championing a "Roadmap" that would give the wealthiest Americans massive tax cuts while imposing a "value-added tax" or savings tax on all goods Americans buy. Their chair of the House Banking Committee wants to limit the Federal Reserve to fighting inflation, removing the goal of employment from its mandate. So much for jobs.

What we need in this country is a national plan for the economy, one that will ensure that we make things in America once more, and one that will put people to work. In the midst of World War II, FDR declared that America had embraced an economic bill of rights grounded on the right to a job. We'd be wise to return to that pledge.

People want work, not handouts. Instead in its first days in office, this Republican majority is intent on dividing us to make ideological points. They keep talking about their mandate, but they aren't listening to the American people or taking a good look at the straits we are in.

 

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