The federal government is being held hostage by a small cabal of the Republican Party whose popularity is on the decline. Rep. Ted Yoho is one of the 80 Republicans in the House of Representatives who signed onto Rep. Mark Meadows’ memo to Speaker John Boehner calling for the Affordable Care Act to be defunded through the budget.
The health care legislation, passed through the House and Senate, was signed by the president and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a law that was not passed using the backhanded tomfoolery we’ve seen this past week in Congress. If the House wishes to change the health care law, it should use the normal legislative process. The tactics being employed by Rep. Yoho are those of a hostage-taker who is desperate to remain politically relevant.This shutdown is little more than an Affordable Care Act proxy war with the nearly 800,000 furloughed federal workers and more than 1 million unpaid essential staff as its collateral damage.
On his recent vote to shut down the federal government, Yoho said, “President Obama and Senate Democrats keep insisting it is the House that is being unreasonable, yet I don’t see a single provision voted on today that doesn’t have the support of a majority of the American people.”
The American people do not want the livelihood of the federal workforce or the services they provide to be shut down due to zealous politicking. Some recent polling proves Yoho and his cohorts are in the minority. A Quinnipiac University poll found 72 percent of Americans are opposed to shutting down the federal government to defund the health care legislation. The CNN/ORC International poll found only 26 percent of Americans approve of the GOP handling of the shutdown. The unpopular nature of this tactic is becoming more loathed as agencies and services are shutting down.
The Head Start program, which provides early education to more than 1 million needy children, has started to close due to this shutdown. This has already affected more than 400 children in the state of Florida. The Women, Infants, and Children program, which helps ensure the nutrition of underprivileged families, is set to run out of funds any day. This will affect the nutrition of 9 million mothers and babies around the nation and more than 16,000 participants in the North Central Florida WIC Program. Yoho’s actions are literally taking young children out of schools and formula out of the mouths of babes.
This shutdown puts an unnecessary burden on our 2.8 million federal workers and disproportionately hurts the most vulnerable among us. It’s time for Rep. Yoho to abandon this farce and do his job. After all, Yoho is one of the few federal workers still getting paid.
Jeremiah Tattersall is on the field staff of the North Central Florida Central Labor Council. This guest column ran on page 7 on 10/8/2013 under the headline "Rep. Yoho needs to help end shutdown"
