It is very commendable that Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, donated her salary during the government shutdown to charity.
But let’s not forget that she had willingly flown to Washington, D.C., to purposely cast a vote to defund the Affordable Care Act, shut down the government and put the United States in a position to default on the payments that the Congress had already authorized.
She voted to deny millions of her fellow Americans the opportunity to obtain government-assisted affordable health insurance, even while her family has coverage from the U.S. government. While slurping at the trough of government, she caused a $24 billion hit to our GDP, created financial havoc and consternation for hundreds of thousands of government employees, withheld critical services from tens of millions of Americans, threatened our credit rating, risked government default and had Wall Street and major corporations scrambling.
Just because in the last hour she would not stand her ground and capitulated, we cannot let her don her “cloak of middle-of-the-road” that she tosses around so cavalierly. She’s a far-right-wing economic extremist willing to do serious harm to this country.
