Action Alert

Please Contact your Representative before May 10^th. 

Message: Ask her/him to vote NO to the Reconciliation legislation.

Background information:

The U.S. House is About to Vote to Make Millions of Low-Income People Lose Health Care, Food and Other Vital Help

Here comes a bill that takes steps to carry out the upside-down priorities of the House budget. The bill expected to reach the House floor on Thursday, May 10 overwhelmingly targets low-income people for cuts – children, families, seniors, people with disabilities.  It is intended to make low-income people shoulder the burden of budget cuts, while protecting the military from reductions and upper-income people from loss of any tax breaks.

The vote in the House is on a package of $261 billion in cuts over 10 years.  Some examples of extreme cuts that will hit low-income people hard:

• All 46 million people receiving food stamps (SNAP) will see their monthly assistance reduced; 2 million will be denied SNAP help altogether.

• 280,000 low-income children will not get free school meals.

• Millions of people will lose Medicaid services.

• 350,000 will go without subsidies to help pay their health insurance premiums.

• Hundreds of thousands of abused or neglected children and seniors will go without essential care and protection.

These ten years of cuts have been proposed in a budget procedure called “reconciliation.”  They are intended to replace one year of cuts scheduled to start next January.  This House bill avoids cuts in the Pentagon budget (about $55 billion).  The bill also replaces one year of cuts to important programs we care deeply about;  education, Head Start, WIC, housing, and much more.  This is an untenable choice that must be rejected.  Congress can protect services that low-income people need by seeking more revenues from the richest among us and from sensible savings in military spending.  This bill however does the opposite – it protects wasteful areas in military spending and those with high incomes by targeting the poor. 
 
This reconciliation bill will probably pass the House; it is not expected to pass in the Senate, and the President would veto it if it did.  But that does not mean the vote doesn’t matter.  Here’s why we are asking you to email your Representative now:

• Congress needs to see that constituents are watching and will hold their Representatives accountable

• Representatives who want to oppose these cuts need to see their constituents want them to hold firm

• These cuts will come up again and again – if votes on them are greeted by silence, they may become law later; if they are loudly opposed, it will be easier to protect against cuts.