Versions of the Truth

I don't know about you, but I like for people to tell me the truth; the honest truth.  I don't want your version of the truth.  Ever since my last blog post about Representative John Culberson's voting record on some key spending bills called Just The Facts, Chicken!, my attention has been focused on him to see what he's going to do next; if he's going to reign in his spending habits, or continue to push us over the fiscal cliff.  Unfortunately, I don't have good news.

Earlier in the week, on Thursday, to be exact, there was a continuing resolution that was voted on by the House of Representatives called H.R. 933; a resolution that will fully fund Obamacare.  According to Yvonne Larsen, a contributing blogger for Big Jolly Politics, who states in her blog, All But One! that: "With the exception of Representative Louis Gohmert (TX-01), every single Republican from the Texas delegation of the U. S House of Representatives voted to fund Obamacare. They even broke their own rules to do it."  Huh.  Interesting.

So, I go to Representative Culberson's Facebook page and lo and behold there is a blog post by one of their staffers about that very CR, titled The Truth About Obamacare and Continuing Resolution.  They seemed to have been getting phone calls about why Congressman Culberson would have voted to fund Obamacare.  Heck, according to his legislative staffer, he'd already vote to repeal Obamacare something like thirty-four or thirty-five times!  So why not vote to fund it?  He'd kept one part of the promise to REPEAL it.  He never mentioned not funding it.

My next step in investigating this was to call his office directly.  I felt like there was something I was missing and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.  So here is in short the phone conversation I had with their staffer: She said that there were essentially 12 appropriations bills all combined into one bill. One of the agencies that was to be funded was the Labor and HHS which funds things like WIC and is the agency that funds Obamacare. They voted to fund all of these things together, so that's where the confusion comes in. She assured me that every year, these agencies have been funded at lower levels, therefore only leaving enough money to fund WIC and NOT Obamacare.  Okay, that may make sense, but this reason that they voted for it makes my blood boil.  They voted for it in part, from my understanding is  that if they had voted no that the bill wouldn't have gone anywhere in the Senate anyway.  SO WHAT?!?  Take a stand!  Vote 'no'!   

Yvonne Larsen raised another question after I shared this information with her.  Why were they in such a hurry to pass the bill?  They didn't even allow for the seventy-two hour wait time that they promised.  No, they were in such a hurry, they voted after the bill was only posted for forty-seven hours.  Sounds a little fishy to me.

On a side note, while having a conversation with this staffer, who was very helpful, by the way, I told her some things that I thought she needed to hear.  I let her know, nicely that Republicans are bad at messaging; that this information they posted about the CR was done in reaction to the response of the constituents, not as a proactive measure.  Then again, if we had known about it, we probably would have called and told him to vote no.  She assured me that they are very active on social media and do try to get their message out.  Culberson is known for his 'cut spending and reduce government waste' stance, so I asked her what have they eliminated.  She couldn't name any specific program or agency right off the top of her head.  Go figure.

Not to get preachy here, but the Bible says something about a person's word, ya know, when you give someone your 'word' that you are or aren't going to do something.  Above all, my brothers, do not swear--not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your "Yes" be yes, and your "No," no, or you will be condemned-James 5:12.  Unfortunately, it doesn't say anything about the things you didn't mention that you might do or the things you didn't promise.  We usually just get some version of the truth.