Guest Post from Daily Kos - Town Halls, then and now

The following post was grabbed from Daily Kos, with the permission of the author, devtob.

 Back in the summer of 2009, tea partiers, egged on by the Republican cable "news" channel and Republican astroturf groups, turned out en masse to disrupt town hall meetings, shout down Democratic Members of Congress, and denounce the pending health care reform bill.

Paul Tonko, a solid progressive who was then a freshman representing NY-21, got the treatment at Elm Avenue Park in Bethlehem, just south of Albany -- lots of delusional Constitution questions and the sign at right.

Tonko more than held his own, explaining the obvious need for HCR and liberally citing the general welfare clause, to the frustration of the tea partiers.

About 600 people attended that town hall, about equally divided between tea partiers and HCR supporters.

Today, Tonko held a town hall in East Greenbush (just east of Albany), and the scene was very different -- about 100 people in a firehouse, only a handful of them tea partiers.

Tonko was at the Clinton Heights firehouse to announce an $87,000 federal grant for portable radios, a thermal imaging camera, and other emergency services equipment, and to present a flag that flew over the Capitol.

But mostly he discussed what's happening in the new Republican-dominated House.

Tonko noted that he's on a new committee -- Budget -- so he's on the front line of the current Continuing Resolution battles. 

There is a proposal in the House to cut spending by $100 billion that has raised concerns for many. The original package presented by Speaker Boehner was for about $32 billion. There is a group, primarily newer elected officials if not the newest, that suggested it should be deeper than $32 billion, it should rise to $100 billion.And if you ask a number of people, why $100 billion, many will suggest it's a number they tossed out in their campaigns.

My problem with that is this was done in a whimsical fashion, there was no calculus, they had not served in Congress, but a three-digit number like 100, billion sounded good. But we have to be careful, because those cuts can be rocking the comeback of the economy.

Since March of last year, we have added 1.5 million private sector jobs. The think tanks around this country are suggesting that the $100 billion cut in domestic programs could cause unemployment of 700,000 to 800,000. So that would wipe out half of the progress made. Setting us back 700,000 to 800,00 jobs is a frightening thought.

Tonko added that the cuts would come entirely from domestic discretionary spending (a small percentage of the overall budget) -- cuts to all forms of education aid, cuts to technological innovation, cuts to public safety, cuts to clean air/clean water regulations, etc.

He noted that the Ryan Roadmap, named after the new Budget Committee chairman who proposed it, is the still GOP's budget blueprint, and that it would privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into an inadequate voucher program (at $11,000 annually, growing by just 2 percent a year, and impoverishing sick seniors).

Tonko said that his top priority is job creation, since he believes that our lingering high unemployment "drives our deficit" and the only effective way to reduce the deficit is to create jobs.

He noted that House Republicans have not introduced even one jobs bill in any committee.

Tonko also explained that the Republicans have not proposed any cuts to the tens of billions spent on military contractors, and have proposed nothing to limit the $100 billion (that number again) in special tax treatment for oil companies, or the tax policies that encourage outsourcing of American jobs.

In the Q&A, most questions reflected concerns over what the radical House Republicans are up to, but there was one bona fide tea party question, asked, naturally, by a guy who obviously receives Social Security and Medicare benefits.

It was long and rambling, deficit/debt/grandchildren blah blah, but here's the essence: 

I find it incredible that out of a $3 trillion budget, we can't find $100 billion to cut.

Tonko replied:

We need to make certain we look at waste, inefficiency, outmoded programs. We need to look at the handouts to oil companies, we need to look at corporate loopholes, we need to look at the Defense Department. I agree with you there are ways to reduce the budget, but in significantly less painful ways. When we start cutting some of these programs they announced, ... 700,000 to 800,000 jobs lost is not what we need right now.

We need to do it in a way that doesn't take an ax to the budget, but a scalpel.
As to our children, the greatest burden we're placing on them is unemployment. Because without a job, there is no hope.

Tea party types tried, albeit half-heartedly, to turn out people to today's town hall.

It's probably natural, after winning the House majority and six (almost seven) seats in New York alone, that tea partiers are just less white-hot angry now than they were in the summer of 2009.

They still don't like Tonko at all, but realize that their candidate against him got trounced in 2010, and that berating Tonko in public would do little to change that result next year.

Indeed, some of them seem more annoyed with their 2010 darling, Chris Gibson of NY-20, than they are with Tonko.

After all, they don't expect Tonko to ever vote the way they want, but they expect Gibson to be with them on every vote.

And when he's not, he's accused of having: 

a fast and loose a la carte interpretation of the Constitution as evidenced by yesterday’s bizarre support for unconstitutional NPR funding and previous support for continued arts funding.

There really is no pleasing hard-core tea partiers until Ron Paul is President, with Paulite supermajorities in both Houses of Congress, and they all drown the federal government in Grover Norquist's bathtub.

Which will never happen.