Tag: angry
Ken Calvert

House Republicans Dismiss Angry Constituents As 'Misinformed' On Budget

Multiple House Republicans have been met by protests against proposed cuts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Many of these lawmakers remain unswayed, Politico reported Monday.

“When the Republican lawmakers returned to the Capitol on Monday, few had wavered in their support for Elon Musk or his attempts to cut giant swaths of the federal government,” Ally Mutnick and Lisa Kashinsky write at Politico. One major concern among protesters is that Republicans could cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in their proposed bill to enact Trump’s tax cuts.

“It’s easy to be critical, but the people voted for change in November, and that’s exactly what they’re getting,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) told Politico. He was booed at a town hall last week. “It’s unfortunate,” he said, “that the other party’s chosen to turn this into a political stunt.”

“I think they were uninformed people, so I really kind of discount that,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who, like Obernolte, was booed at a town hall last week. “I think once you’re informed you realize that we’ve got a lot of financial problems,” he said.

“I’m used to it,” Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) said of protesters at his office. “It’s just another day in paradise.”

Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR) as well as Reps. Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) and Mark Alford (R-MO) were also met with angry crowds. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) tried to settle the crowd as they booed him and chanted “shame.”

“Yell all you want. I can’t understand ten people let alone 100 people at once,” McCormick said in a video posted to X by an Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist last week, AlterNet reported.

Unlike others, McCormick changed course, saying Monday that he “plans to reach out to Elon Musk to urge him to show more compassion on DOGE cuts & layoffs,” NBC News’ Melanie Zanona reported.

“The town halls were concentrated in deep-red districts where GOP members could expect to find a friendlier audience,” write Mutnick and Kashinsky. “They are not the districts that will determine the House majority, but the fact that even those events have been marked with rancor could signal a broader discontent with Musk and his actions.”

GOP lawmakers told Politico that their constituents back Musk’s cuts, despite polling that suggests his unpopularity is growing.

“I’ve not heard anybody say they didn’t want to cut anything, it’s just they don’t like Elon,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) told reporters. He, too, faced a tough crowd last week. “We’re moving forward with the cuts,” he said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Obama Gets Mad: Can Republicans “Say Yes To Anything!?”

Early Friday evening, Obama angrily explained to the press that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) walked away from negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit.

Obama said that he and the Speaker had agreed to a plan that would offer $1 trillion in discretionary spending cuts, $650 billion of modest cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and only $1.2 trillion in revenue increases. The revenue increases, he added, would not require tax increases, but only closing tax loopholes.

This plan was apparently even more generous to Republicans than the plan developed by the bipartisan group of Senators known as the “Gang of Six,” which was supported by many Republicans. Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other liberal Democrats were uneasy with the Gang of Six proposal because it called for cuts to entitlement programs that serve the poor and elderly, rather than raising taxes on the wealthy.

Earlier on Friday, Pelosi signaled she was willing to accept spending cuts so long as bedrock Democratic priorities are kept safe, in contrast to previously floated plans to raise the eligibility age of Social Security or Medicare, which Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) derided as “[people] who’ve been sitting on their asses their whole lives telling some woman who’s been standing on her feet as a store clerk that 67’s too early for her — she should do it till she’s 70.” As Talking Points Memoexplains:

The plan would place a firewall between entitlement spending and the threat of default, upsetting GOP plans to force deep, immediate cuts to those programs. And if, as a result, the GOP declined the offer, Democrats would agree to punt the questions of entitlement spending and tax revenues to a future, streamlined legislative process.

The potential endgame, Pelosi said, would meet an arbitrary GOP requirement that Congress must only grant President Obama as much new borrowing authority as he’s willing to accept in spending cuts, and leave for a later date a twinned fight over revenues and social insurance programs.

Despite her reservations, though, Pelosi was at least willing to consider a similar plan, and Obama promised that he would try to persuade his party to accept a balanced plan that includes moderate cuts to entitlement programs in order to reduce the deficit. Boehner, on the other hand, simply walked away from the negotiations. This led Obama to mock the Republicans, telling them they had “to ask themselves, can they say yes to anything?”

After Obama’s press conference, Speaker Boehner held one of his own, in which he accused the President of asking for $1.2 trillion in revenue increases, despite earlier agreeing only to ask for $800 billion.

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