Spineless GOP’s Refusal To Reign In Tea Party Ignorance Jeopardizes Court System

It’s common knowledge that Republican members of Congress are so afraid of the Tea Party Ignorance and its movement. The Tea Party groups that are holding them political hostage. The problem with the Tea Party ignorance is that not only do they not understand the principals of sovereign debt. They also don’t understand the actual fundamentals of their own government.  It’s pretty apparent the movement’s leaders slept through high school government.

GOP leadership are afraid of primaries challenges by the Tea Party. The group paints an unrealistic vision of government. GOP leadership have also demanded federal sequester cuts that make absolutely no sense.

Chris Savage at Eclectablog wrote that the federal judge appointed to be the mediator in Detroit’s bankruptcy process sent a letter signed by 87 federal district court judges to Vice President Joe Biden. The letter requested that the Senate take action to reverse cuts in funding to the federal Judiciary due to sequestration.

 The GOP congress have slashed their operations to the bone according to Judge Rosen’s letter (pdf),

According to Savage, as a result of sequestration, the Judiciary’s budget has been reduced by nearly $350 million and Rosen’s staff has been cut by 63 people.  Other massive cuts include:

• Clerks and probation and pretrial services support staff downsized by as many as 1,000 staff members, a group that has already experienced a reduction of 2,100 staff members in the past two year

• A cut of 600 probation and pretrial service officers at a time when they are experiencing record numbers of convicted offenders

• A 30% cut in court security systems and equipment

• $50 million cut in the Defender Services budget which covers constitutionally-mandated court representation for indigent defendants which, ironically, has caused them to hire private attorneys at a higher cost

According to Michael Grunwald of Time magazine puts it, the GOP has shot themselves in the foot for their refusal to compromise and reign in the Tea Party:

The sequester is here, with an initial $85 billion worth of haphazard and economically destructive spending cuts, a Washington wound almost universally described as “self-inflicted.” Let’s be clearer: It’s Republican-inflicted. It is a direct result of the insistence by GOP leaders in the summer of 2011 that they would not raise the federal debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to dramatic spending cuts. One can argue that the growth of the debt or the size of the government justified that insistence; I’d disagree. But it’s simply a fact that every budget crisis of the last two years—the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, the failure of the “supercommittee,” the fiscal cliff, and now this—stems from Republican debt-limit brinksmanship.

Savage draws a great conclusion on this whole mess by writing:

Once again, Detroiters will pay the price for something they had nothing to do with.