Joseph Sabino Mistick: Dishonoring America’s heroes

“They’re slitting their own throats and throwing themselves overboard” is how an old pal and management consultant once described the self-destructive actions of an organization he was asked to evaluate. The nonprofit was imploding, turning in on itself, like a ship full of mad pirates.

If you ask the nation’s leading veterans organizations, that’s what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Republican caucus have just done with the passage of what Republicans call the Limit, Save, Grow Act. It is McCarthy’s attempt to muscle concessions out of the Biden administration in exchange for voting to raise the nation’s debt limit.

But that has already backfired. McCarthy can now add veterans to other groups Republicans have recently alienated: women who want to make their own medical decisions and families seeking gun reform to stop the slaughter of innocents.

When Republican lawmakers refused to support raising the debt limit in 2011, it cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in borrowing costs just that first year and resulted in the downgrading of America’s bond rating for the first time in history. This time, economists say it will cause a global economic crisis.

Plus, it’s dumb. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like a family deciding to cut costs by not paying the electric bill they already owe. The debt that must be paid now is for things we have already purchased. We are just keeping our promise to pay.

And McCarthy’s gambit won’t work. The Democratic-controlled Senate won’t consider the bill, and President Biden would veto it if it passed. So, what have the House Republicans gained by going on record against our veterans — our nation’s heroes — for a pointless bill destined to fail? The enmity of our veterans.

As reported by Stars and Stripes, the Republican bill would cut the Department of Veterans Affairs budget by 22% and result in 30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits, the loss of 81,000 VA jobs, the loss of housing support for 50,000 veterans, the delayed opening of five new national cemeteries, the cancellation of the construction of new health facilities and the loss of mental health and substance abuse treatment.

No matter how the Republicans explain this, they cannot say that they didn’t know what they were doing.

In a letter to Congress before the bill came up for a vote, 20 veterans organizations warned them that this bill would have a disastrous effect on veterans and their families. But McCarthy went full speed ahead.

Western Pennsylvania’s own Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Democrat and former Navy officer who served in Iraq, said this after passage of the bill: “America owes a sacred debt to those willing to lay it all on the line. This Republican budget plan betrays that promise, and I am furious.”

And he told Stars and Stripes, “It’s the same guys who I see all the time wrapping themselves in the flag, using my fellow veterans and me as props in their ads and on their websites. No more. They should be hearing from all of us.”

More and more, it seems that I knew more about politics 10 years ago than I do now. The mindlessness and lack of patriotism in politics today is hard to comprehend. There was time when politicians faithfully supported our veterans, and not just because it was good politics. It was because it was the right thing to do. I think it still is.