Congressman Farenthold,I read your column in our newspaper and I appreciate the concern and effort but in the words of Senator Dianne Feinstein," don't talk to me like I'm a sixth grader.” The sequester is not about a family budget, and I know that it's not about a 3 percent cut. Those cuts are to be made over a seven-month period, and they're not across the board.
Congress and the White House knew that the cuts would be painful that's why they used it as a trigger mechanism to make both parties come up with a better solution.
You are obviously in a situation where you now have to justify the sequester cuts because they will affect your constituents. If the Federal Aviation Administration had spared Victoria; there would have been another congressman complaining about his district being cut. This didn’t have to happen if your party accepted revenues as part of a grand bargain to stop all these games.
Congressman Farenthold, what is it with discontinuing White House tours that binds your right-wing colleagues? It would be great if you showed that same anger for all the cuts, the poor and the elderly will endure. You know the ones in the Ryan budget you recently voted for. That kind of talk probably got you a fat check from your country club constituents, but I'm not going to lay awake at night worrying about White House tours.
I'm all for efforts like the Protecting America’s Civilian Employees Act you introduced to cut wasteful government spending, but we all know that non- discretionary defense spending is not the problem. Eliminating waste and duplication should be an ongoing effort despite budgets, continuing resolutions or partisan food fights. I'll keep my cable, so I can keep up with the happenings in Washington. That's how I know that the big-ticket items that we have to control is defense spending, Medicare, and Medicaid. It won't take much to put Social Security back on a track of solvency for another 75 years.
Congressman Farenthold, keep looking for all those savings and let’s use that money to restore the Pell Grants the Ryan budget eliminates because that can create a bright future for our children.
Finally, Mr. Congressman, I just read a graph in the Washington Post showing that Congress is less popular than lice and colonoscopies, so you have some nerve trying to put all the blame of the sequester cuts on the president. The president inherited a financial mess,he didn’t get any help from your party to clean it up, and now you throw the sequestered cuts on top of that and complain because the pain of those cuts are starting to show up.
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Then there is Sean Hannity and other right –wing pundits saying that the president has time to fill out his March Madness bracket but he can’t submit a budget on time.
The right puts so much emphasis on submitting a budget and in an ideal world they would be justified in doing so. I doubt if they would be taking this high road and if they didn’t have the numbers to pass anything they wanted. What’s the hurry? The house passed their budget which went to die in the senate and the senate passed theirs which will die in the house. There’s no room for reconciliation. Even if the White House would have submitted their budget on time, Congress still would’ve left for their two week vacation yesterday.
A budget is not near as important as entitlement reform, defense spending reform, and tax reform is. But that’s just on the spending side; we still need revenues for growth and jobs projects.
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