REPUBLICANS JUST DON’T LIKE THE UNEMPLOYED, CONT’D…. The evidence continues to pile up to suggest Republican lawmakers and candidates actively dislike — on a personal level — those who’ve lost their jobs in the recession.
Take Sharron Angle, the extremist Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, for example. Nevada recently passed Michigan as the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country, so it stands to reason that candidates in the state would be sympathetic to the plight of the jobless.
But Angle doesn’t quite see it that way. This video, put together by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) campaign, highlights the Republican candidate’s perspective on the unemployed, whom she describes as “spoiled.” Angle added in a separate public appearance, “As your U.S. Senator, I’m not in the business of creating jobs.”
This fits into a larger pattern for the party. One GOP congressman recently compared the unemployed to “hobos.” In the House, GOP lawmakers tried to eliminate a successful jobs program. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) actually started pushing a measure to require the unemployed to take mandatory drug tests in exchange for benefits. Kentucky’s Rand Paul wants the jobless to quit their bellyaching and “get back to work.”
And this week, a unanimous Republican Senate caucus will apparently kill a tax-extenders bill that will, in turn, cut off unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans, and cut off state aid that will lead to hundreds of thousands of additional layoffs.
What did the unemployed ever do to offend the Republican Party this much?
