{"id":40066,"date":"2014-02-27T16:37:45","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T21:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=40066"},"modified":"2014-02-27T16:37:45","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T21:37:45","slug":"vet-bill-fails-in-the-senate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=40066","title":{"rendered":"Vet bill fails in the Senate"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Democrat sponsored bill failed in the Senate when 41 Republicans voted against it after the Democrats voted down a bill for more sanctions against Iran. The Democrat bill would have vastly expanded spending for veterans on things like treatment for veterans with no service-connected injuries and a taxpayer-funded gym membership for overweight veterans who live more than 15 minutes from a VA gym. From the Associated Press<\/a>;<\/p>\n

Republicans criticized how most of Sanders’ bill was paid for \u2014 with unspent money from the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the winding down of American military involvement in Afghanistan. The GOP says those are not real savings because no one expected those dollars to be spent as those wars ended.<\/p>\n

Republicans also objected to provisions making more veterans without service-connected injuries eligible for treatment at Department of Veterans Affairs facilities. They said that would swamp an already overburdened system.<\/p>\n

The vote sidetracking the bill was 56-41, with supporters falling four votes short of the 60 they needed to prevail. Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Dean Heller of Nevada were the only Republicans voting to keep the legislation alive and the only lawmakers crossing party lines on the vote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Democrats leaped at the opportunity to smear Republicans for their vote by running ads against at least one Senator (Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell). Stolen Valor executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and founder of OpTruth, Paul Rieckhoff also couldn’t wait to weigh in;<\/p>\n

“Veterans don’t have time for this nonsense and veterans are tired of being used as political chew toys,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which supported the legislation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Look, veterans are being chastised across the country for not accepting the things that take money from our pockets, like “paltry” cuts to our cost of living allowances, and “insignificant” hikes to our healthcare costs (while the Pentagon raids our $770 million surplus), so why are Senators trying to pay for gym memberships? Why do they want to push veterans who don’t have service-connected issues into the already over-burdened VA medical care? If everyone is trying to cut spending, we certainly don’t want to be seen as greedy beggars getting free gym memberships.<\/p>\n

And, Rieckhoff, you’re one to talk about veterans as “political chew toys”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Democrat sponsored bill failed in the Senate when 41 Republicans voted against it after the … Vet bill fails in the Senate<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress-sucks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}