This week, Republicans in the Senate blocked ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. They did so in front of former Republican Senator Bob Dole, who was in a wheelchair on the Senate floor to show his support for passage of this treaty. At the age of 89, he was just out of the hospital after a severe health crisis.
This is not my father’s Republican Party.
All that day I heard from people with disabilities, literally in tears, telling me how hurt and angry they were by this vote. I feel their pain. Crazy conservatives ginned up the rhetoric around this issue, suggesting it would somehow require U.S. citizens to end home-schooling. I have nothing against home schooling (in fact many of my viewers and listeners are passionately in support of it), but this treaty has NOTHING to do with home schooling. The GOP invented the issue and, not having learned any lessons from Mittens’ campaign, they refused to be persuaded by “fact checkers.”
Thirty-eight Republicans walked by Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP presidential nominee, shook his hand and voted, “NAY.” These people are both clueless and heartless. When the U.S. Senate has sunk so low and become so blindly partisan, the entire country suffers for it.
I’d like to tell you that everything I’ve just written is just a joke — haha — but I can’t. It all really happened. And after 2014, it’s our responsibility to make sure that it never happens again.
(Photo: Getty Images)
http://current.com/shows/talking-liberally/blog/theyre-just-mean/