Jen Kiggans Puts Party Over Constituents

In theory members of Congress should cast votes that best further the interests of their constituents. Sadly, in today's Republican Party that rarely happens and congressional Republicans vote to support the agenda of the most extreme elements of the GOP party base, principally anti-abortionists, Christian extremists, know nothing and Qanon kooks, and supposed deficit hawks who want to slash programs that aid millions even as they support massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the largest corporations.  What is best for the econmic well being of their districts and the constituents who reside there simply do not matter.  A case in point is Jen Kiggans (pictured above) who represents Virginia's 2nd District thanks to a redrawn district that loaded rural voters into the district while shrinking urban areas voters from the district.  This allowed Kiggans, an extremiston many issues to defeat moderate Democrat Elaine Lura last November.   Kiggans has wasted little time in betraying the best interests of the constituents in her district while voting for a debt reduction bill that would slash funding for programs crucial to the future of the Hampton Roads (sometimes called Coastal Virginia).  Now, the rural cretins, homophobes and bigots who voted for Kiggans and the rest of the 1.7 million people in the region could all well pay a severe economic price as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  As the piece indicates, Kiggans is hardly the only congressional Republican to betray constituents.  Here are column excerpts:

Jen Kiggans had the haunted look of a woman about to walk the plank. The first-term Republican from Virginia barely took her eyes off her text Wednesday as she read it aloud on the House floor. She tripped over words and used her fingers to keep her place on the page.

The anxiety was understandable. Like about 30 other House Republicans from vulnerable districts, she was about to vote in favor of the GOP’s plan to force spending cuts of about $4.8 trillion as the ransom to be paid for avoiding a default on the federal debt.

Kiggans then cast her vote to abolish the clean-energy credits her constituents find so “beneficial.”

House GOP leaders are celebrating their ability to pass their debt plan, even though it has no chance of surviving the Senate nor President Biden’s veto pen. But the bill’s passage has achieved one thing that cannot be undone: It has put 217 House Republicans on record in favor of demolishing popular government services enjoyed by their constituents.

In Kiggans’s Virginia, the legislation she just backed would strip tax incentives that go to the likes of Dominion Energy, which is building a $9.8 billion offshore wind project in her district. She also voted to ax solar and electric-vehicle incentives for hundreds of thousands of Virginians, and tax breaks projected to bring $11.6 billion in clean-power investment to the commonwealth.

In addition, the bill she supported sets spending targets that require an immediate 22 percent cut to all “non-defense discretionary spending” — that’s border security, the FBI, airport security, air traffic control, highways, agriculture programs, veterans’ health programs, food stamps, Medicaid, medical research, national parks and much more. If they want to cut less than 22 percent in some of those areas, they’ll have to cut more than 22 percent in others.

According to an administration analysis of what the 22 percent cuts translate to, Kiggans is now on record supporting:

Shutting down at least two air traffic control towers in Virginia.

Jeopardizing outpatient medical care for 162,300 Virginia veterans.

Throwing up to 175,000 Virginians off food stamps and ending food assistance for another 25,000 through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program Women, Infants and Children.

Cutting or ending Pell Grants for 162,900 Virginia college students.

Eliminating Head Start for 3,600 Virginia children and child care for another 1,300 children.

Adding at least two months to wait times for Virginia seniors seeking assistance with Social Security and Medicare.

Denying opioid treatment for more than 600 Virginians.

Ending 180 days of rail inspections per year and 1,350 fewer miles of track inspected.

Kicking 13,400 Virginia families off rental assistance.

Similar calculations can be made for the other 30 House Republicans targeted by Democrats in the 2024 elections who joined Kiggans in walking the plank. Since enactment of the clean-energy credits Republicans have now voted to repeal, for example, clean-energy projects worth some $198 billion and 77,261 jobs have moved forward in districts represented by Republicans, according to the advocacy group Climate Power.

[T]he record is now clear. Kiggans and other House Republicans just voted to curb or eliminate a huge swath of government services that Americans rely on — and their constituents ought to know it.

Soon after Republicans assumed the House majority in January, McCarthy said that “our very first responsibility” was “to pass a budget.” But the majority couldn’t pass a budget.

[O]nly six of 30 bills so far followed “regular order,” according a tally by Democrats on the House Rules Committee that Republicans did not dispute. And this week, McCarthy threw on the floor, without a single committee hearing, “the largest spending cut in American history” (as Rep. Kevin Hern (Okla.), head of the 173-member House Republican Study Committee, put it).

Republicans long howled about “giant bills negotiated in secret, then jammed through on a party-line vote in the middle of the night.” . . . But this week, they jammed their giant, secretly negotiated debt-limit bill through the Rules Committee on a party-line vote — at 2:19 a.m. And they did it with a “deem-and-pass” rule.

Even then, after all the reversals and surrenders, the bill came within one vote of failing. The lawmaker who cast the final, deciding vote? Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.).

How apt that this legislation, built on one broken promise after another, should be carried over the finish line by the world’s most famous liar.

At the start of this manufactured debt-limit crisis, I worried that ideological extremism might drive the nation to a first-ever default. But an equal threat to America’s full faith and credit may be incompetence. Those in the House majority don’t know what they don’t know.

The Treasury is forecast to go into default in June. But Rep. Tim Burchett (Tenn.), emerging from the GOP caucus meeting Wednesday morning, told a group of us that “we’re not going to default.” Why? “I think September’s the actual drop-dead date, so we’re good.”

Coming out of the same meeting, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) still seemed confused about what happens when the government defaults. (Hint: It has nothing to do with a government shutdown.) “Let the Senate shut the government down,” he proclaimed. “Let them take the heat for shutting it down.”

At the Rules Committee hearing, Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) offered his view that the Federal Reserve is “not an independent agency.” (It is.) . . . Many Republicans, like Kiggans, swallowed their misgivings.

Kiggans needs to be voted out of office in 2024. The question is whether voters in the 2nd District can let go of their hatreds and bigotry and vote for their own best economic interests.