There Is No Bottom To The GOP Barrel

(The wonderful graphic above is from the website for the Altamonte Springs Advisory Board for the Disabled.)

Many people (including me) had believed that the current Republicans in the U.S. Congress couldn't sink any lower. After all, they have proposed cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits for the elderly, cutting unemployment benefits for those without work, eliminating the minimum wage, cutting education funds for children (and eliminating free lunches for poor children), cutting welfare programs for the poor, cutting food stamps for hungry families, cutting environmental funds for clean air and water, and doing all of that just so they could give massive new tax breaks to their rich friends. How could they get any more hard-hearted and mean-spirited than that?

Well, they found a way. They decided to add disabled people to the growing list of people they are willing to throw under the bus. Last Tuesday (12/4/12), the United States Senate voted on ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This treaty required a two-thirds vote of the Senate for ratification. It would not have required any other action on the part of the United States (since with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act a few years ago the U.S. already meets all of the rights listed in the treaty). But U.S. approval of the treaty would have shown leadership by the U.S. in providing rights for the disabled, and would have encouraged other countries to follow the U.S. lead and provide rights for their own disabled citizens.

But 38 Republican senators voted against ratifying the treaty, so it was not ratified. For most of these senators, the simple fact that the treaty bore the name of the United Nations was reason enough to vote against it (since they hate the U.N. and are convinced it has some kind of nefarious plan to take over the U.S.). I'll admit, the idiocy of this kind of thinking is well beyond my comprehension. By refusing to ratify this treaty, the United States is telling the rest of the world that it doesn't even support its own laws (guaranteeing rights to the disabled). And if the U.S. won't even ratify a treaty based on its own laws, why should other countries grant rights to their own disabled citizens? This action by Republicans will actually hurt disabled people worldwide.

To their credit, there were eight Republican senators who joined all Democrats and Independents and voted to ratify the treaty. They are:
Ayotte (New Hampshire)
Barrasso (Wyoming)
Brown (Massachusetts)
Collins (Maine)
Lugar (Indiana)
McCain (Arizona)
Murkowski (Alaska)
Snowe (Maine)

There were 38 Republicans voting against the treaty. In voting this way, these 38 Republicans have found a way to sink even lower on the scale of political depravity (and prove there is no bottom to the GOP barrel). Frankly, I don't understand how they can even look at themselves in the mirror.