GOP to Jobless Vets: Drop Dead | Mother Jones:
In saying that, Coburn seemed to argue that government spending is more of a "real problem" than the plight of US vets. Young ex-service members—many of whom were among in the now-famous 47 percent of non-income-tax-paying Americans while they were deployed or held junior ranks—face unemployment levels up to 35 percent higher than their civilian counterparts. It's a plight that Romney and other Republicans pay lip-service to in their attacks on the White House. "President Obama's policies threaten to break faith with our veterans and our military," Romney's campaign literature (PDF) states. "We can do better."
Yet conservatives' plan this week was to block a pro-veteran bill that had the support of the GOP-led Congress, all the Senate Democrats, and five Republicans in the upper body. "These men and women have worn our uniform, shouldered the burden and faced unthinkable dangers in forward areas during a very dangerous time," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told the New York Times. For his part, Sessions says he'd vote for a budget-neutral GOP-drafted version of the bill—a version that saves money by doing away with the Veterans Job Corps, which was ostensibly the whole point of the proposal in the first place. Sometimes you have to destroy a jobs bill in order to save it.
